If Your Tech Isn’t Accessible, You Are Losing Out to the Next Wave of Agents
Blog | December 11, 2025
By: Gavin Wills, SVP, Engineering
For years, accessibility has mostly been framed as a moral obligation and a compliance requirement: make sure people with disabilities can use your product, avoid legal risk, do the right thing. That foundation still matters, and it always will. At its core, accessibility is simply about designing and building experiences so everyone can use them, regardless of their abilities, devices, or context.
What’s changing now is the business context around it. As browser and OS-level agents start to use products on behalf of users, accessibility is becoming business-critical infrastructure. The same structures that help a screen reader understand your interface will help agents understand it too, and that will influence which products are easier to recommend, automate, and integrate into people’s workflows. The same semantic layer also tends to improve search visibility, reduce integration friction, and make complex UIs cheaper to maintain. In other words: accessibility is quietly becoming part of your core product surface area, not just a compliance checkbox.
There’s a slightly uncomfortable truth here: many organizations will finally prioritize accessibility because AI agents make it commercially urgent, not just ethically important. That can feel depressing. But a rising tide really does lift all boats. An application that is accessible and works smoothly with agents doesn’t just please procurement and product teams; it exponentially expands the real-world reach for users with accessibility needs and usually makes the product clearer and more robust for everyone else as well.
What does an “accessible” application actually mean?
In standard language, an accessible app is one where content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. In practice, for digital products, that largely comes down to one thing: how you describe your UI in code so assistive tech can work with it.
Screen readers don’t “see” your layout the way a sighted user does; they read the structure you’ve given them. That structure is mostly defined by:
- Semantic HTML – using actual buttons, links, headings, lists and forms instead of anonymous <div>s.
- Clear labelling – every interactive element has a meaningful name that can be spoken out.
- Predictable order – moving through the page with the keyboard follows a logical flow.
On top of that, WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) lets you be even more explicit about what’s happening in your UI. With ARIA attributes, you can tell a screen reader (and increasingly, an agent):
- what something is (role=”button”, role=”dialog”, role=”navigation”),
- how it should be described (aria-label, aria-labelledby),
- what state it’s in (aria-expanded, aria-checked, aria-disabled).
In other words, semantic HTML plus ARIA is the narration layer of your application. Get that right, and you’re not just enabling screen readers today – you’re also giving AI agents, search engines, and other tools a clean, reliable map of your product for tomorrow.
“Can’t the agent just look at the screen?”
Short answer: it can – but it’s the slow, expensive, fragile option.
When an agent has to “look” at your UI (screenshots, DOM, vision models) instead of reading proper structure, you pay a tax on every interaction:
- Performance & latency
- Vision + reasoning is much slower than reading semantic HTML + ARIA.
- Every step becomes: capture → send → interpret → act, instead of directly querying structure.
- Financial & environmental cost
- Vision+LLM calls are among the most compute-hungry (and therefore costly).
- At scale, that’s higher cloud bills and a higher carbon footprint for journeys that could have been cheap metadata lookups.
- Accuracy & reliability
- The agent is guessing from pixels and layout. A small CSS tweak or copy change can break flows.
- It’s easy to misidentify the “main” button, the current state, or whether something succeeded.
A well-described UI (semantic HTML + ARIA) lets agents skip the guessing and just read what’s on the page. Screen readers depend on that today. Smart agents will default to it tomorrow.
What should companies be doing now?
The good news: this isn’t a new playbook. The accessibility practices screen readers have relied on for years are exactly what will make your product legible to agents too – and they usually bring side benefits in search, support, and maintainability.
- Fix your core flows first
- Take 2–3 key journeys (sign-up, checkout, main dashboard).
- Make sure they work end-to-end with keyboard + screen reader.
- Bake accessibility into your design system
- Use real buttons/links/forms, not clickable <div>s.
- Add correct roles and ARIA once in shared components so every team benefits.
- Give it an owner and a narrative
- Make one team/person clearly accountable.
- Frame the work as: “We’re making our product understandable to users and to the next wave of agents.”
These long-standing accessibility practices suddenly have new leverage: they make your app genuinely usable today, easier to search and integrate, and “agent-ready” by default.
Final thought
Agents won’t replace accessibility work; they’ll amplify the gap between products that did it and products that didn’t.
An app that is both accessible and agent-friendly doesn’t just tick a box. It gives users with accessibility needs a huge upgrade: a UI they can navigate themselves, plus a capable assistant that understands that UI and can act on their behalf.
If your technology isn’t accessible, you’re not just risking complaints or missing a guideline.
You’re leaving distribution, automation, and a growing part of your user base on the table.
In the age of agents, accessibility isn’t extra. It’s how your product explains itself to the world.
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