accessibility-score

What this datapoint measures

Accessibility to assistive technology — alt text on images, ARIA labels where appropriate, keyboard navigability, color contrast, semantic markup that screen readers can navigate. Whether the brand’s content is accessible to users with disabilities and to the AI systems that increasingly use accessibility-tagged content for grounding.

What high looks like

• Alt text on all images, descriptive and meaningful
• ARIA labels on interactive elements without semantic HTML equivalents
• Keyboard navigation working throughout
• Color contrast meeting WCAG AA standards
• Form labels properly associated
• Headings used semantically (relates to content-hierarchy)
• Text resizable without breaking layout
• Video and audio content with transcripts and captions

What low looks like

• Missing or generic alt text (“image1.jpg”)
• Missing ARIA labels on custom interactive elements
• Keyboard traps or non-keyboard-navigable elements
• Color contrast failures
• Form fields without labels
• Video and audio without transcripts

What at floor looks like

A brand at floor on accessibility-score has substantial accessibility failures across the site. Users with disabilities cannot use the site effectively; AI systems that consume accessibility-tagged content (alt text, ARIA labels, transcripts) cannot extract that content because it’s missing or malformed.

The remedy involves substantial engineering work in some cases (rebuilding inaccessible custom components) and substantial editorial work in others (writing alt text and transcripts). This is one of the more time-intensive V2.2 datapoints to lift.

What affects this datapoint

• Alt text presence and quality
• ARIA label use
• Keyboard navigability
• Color contrast
• Form label association
• Semantic heading usage (overlap with content-hierarchy)
• Video and audio transcripts

OMG actions that influence this datapoint

Action	Influence
O-4 Technical Infrastructure, Performance & International Foundation	Substantial. Template-level accessibility fixes are O-4 work.
O-7 Compliance & Trust Infrastructure	Substantial. Compliance work often surfaces and remedies accessibility gaps.
M-7 Multimedia Content Optimization	Direct. Multimedia work includes alt text and transcript creation.

Multilingual considerations

Accessibility considerations have language-specific aspects:

• Alt text and transcripts must be in the page’s content language (Japanese pages need Japanese alt text)
• Screen reader behavior differs by language; testing should include screen readers in primary languages, not just English
• ARIA labels should be localized; an English-only ARIA label on a Japanese-language page is a degradation

Common failure modes

• Decorative images with auto-generated alt text (“photo,” “image”)
• Custom interactive components without ARIA labels
• Color choices that fail contrast in specific viewport configurations
• Auto-played video without captions
• Forms with placeholder text serving as the only label (placeholders disappear on input)
• ARIA labels in English on non-English content

Diagnostic interpretation

Accessibility-score at floor with semantic-html (V1.1) also low indicates broad template-level work needed. O-4 work is the remedy.

Accessibility-score at low with content-formatting at high indicates a brand with formatted content but accessibility gaps. The two datapoints are partially independent; remediation is targeted.

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