At WP:26, Human Made’s virtual event exploring the future of WordPress, much of the conversation focused on what’s changing across the web. AI is accelerating workflows, enterprise platforms are becoming more complex, and expectations around digital experiences continue to rise.
But in the middle of all that change, one session brought the conversation back to something more fundamental.
In a conversation with Rian Rietveld, we explored accessibility not as a compliance exercise or a checklist, but as a core part of how we design and build for the web. It quickly became clear that while the tools and technologies around us are evolving rapidly, the question of who we are building for remains just as important as ever.
Throwing off the shackles of compliance checklists, Rian delivered a clear and focused take on how accessible design fundamentally impacts your audience reach and revenue. Across an insight-packed 30-minutes, she guided us through the current state of WordPress accessibility, the awesome WP Accessibility Knowledge Base project she’s been working on, and—crucially—the highest-return investment teams can make today.
Read on to get the key moments and insights from Rian’s session.
From compliance to commercial reality
One of the most striking themes from the session was how quickly the conversation around accessibility is shifting. What was once framed as a compliance requirement is increasingly being recognised as a commercial imperative.
Excluding users with disabilities doesn’t just create a poorer experience, it actively limits your audience. As Rian pointed out, that audience is far from marginal. In fact, the cost of getting accessibility wrong is measurable, with billions in lost revenue each year in markets like the UK alone.
For teams building on the web, this reframes the challenge. Accessibility is no longer about meeting minimum standards or ticking regulatory boxes. It is about ensuring your product is usable by as many people as possible, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it directly impacts reach, engagement, and ultimately, revenue.
Accessibility, AI, and search are converging
One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was how accessibility is increasingly intersecting with other concerns that teams are already prioritising, particularly around AI and search.
As highlighted throughout WP:26, machines are playing a growing role in how content is discovered, interpreted, and acted upon. Whether it is search engines, assistive technologies, or AI agents, all of these systems depend on the same underlying signals to make sense of the web.
Those signals are not new. They include things like semantic HTML, clear heading structures, meaningful labels, and predictable interactions. In other words, the same practices that have always underpinned accessible design.
What is changing is the level of importance. Accessibility is no longer a separate consideration running alongside SEO or AI readiness. It is becoming part of the same foundation. If content is not structured in a way that machines can understand, it becomes harder to find, harder to interpret, and ultimately less useful.
That convergence raises the stakes. Getting accessibility right is no longer just about supporting specific users. It is about ensuring content works in an increasingly machine-mediated web.
Actionable strategy: The highest-return on investment
If advising a digital leader, Rian shared the single highest-return investment in 2026:
- Training people: Train your designers, content creators, and developers on how to build accessible products. Most accessibility is “just decent code, decent HTML.”
- Prioritise keyboard navigation: A website and all its functionality must be able to work with the keyboard only. This is the essence of accessibility and should be a non-negotiable testing priority.
- Contribute to the Knowledge Base: Rian encouraged the community to get involved with the WP Accessibility Knowledge Base to create one central source of truth for all WordPress accessibility documentation.
“If you create only for perfect people, people who have perfect eyesight, are clear of mind, can move their hands, are web savvy. Well, then you say, okay, only those people are allowed in my web shop and the rest of the people I don’t give access to and the rest of the people are quite a lot of people. So you have to take into account that you build for everyone, not only for perfect people.” – Rian Rietveld, Web Accessibility Specialist.