I’m really grateful to work at a place like GitHub where accessiblity is really taken seriously.

But, industry-wide, I feel like we haven’t seen as much care and dedication to accessibility historically. Anecdotally, I’ve heard countless developers ask the question, “how do I get my bosses to care about accessibility work as much as I do?” It’s an important thing to have, a no-brainer in my opinion, and I’ll not argue for accessibility in this post.

That being said:

Now, more than ever, accessibility feels much more like a first-class citizen, and I think there’s a few reasons for this.

Firstly, it’s easier than ever to implement things in a “correct” and accessible way with AI tools. You can tell your agents to be WCAG-compliant (or whatever tools your team uses), and it can just… do it. And that’s really amazing!

Secondly, and more… interestingly, a lot of people are making their applications accessible because if a human cannot navigate a website, an agent might not be able to either.

Accessible applications are better for humans and for AI agents, too. And that’s a good thing! But also weird and kind of unfortunate that we got to accessibility being treated better as a practice this way (the scenic route, ha), instead of just accepting that it’s better for other humans.

The model of the internet is changing. Typically unless you pay for a subscription somewhere, everything on the internet is “free” and you pay with your attention. This is how the ads industry online exploded, this is how clickbait titles became the norm, this is how popular tech creators fell into shilling ragebait regularly, and this is why you have to scroll through an entire novel about a recipe before you get to the ingredients for your risotto.

But, that model works if and only if the user of an app or the visitor of a website is a human being. Recently, Cloudflare’s “Bot vs. Human” tracker revealed that more than half of the internet traffic we see now is coming from automated bots. Bots don’t click on ads and they rarely make buying decisions and they don’t spend time on sites more than they have to. The internet was built for humans, but as it is increasingly bot-driven… what will the internet become?

I’m optimistic, for what it’s worth. If a bot-heavy internet means that more applications are streamlined, open standards are improved, and accessibility is a given, that means we as people get more quality experiences versus attention-grabbing ones. I’m excited about that. I ultimately hope that it means that we can be more creative with humans, and build an internet where bots can do their silent surfing underneath, while humans can experience the benefits of a platform that doesn’t need to be selling you something, constantly.

…or we’ll all just go touch grass.