Accessibility walked so AI could crawl

AI search, LLM retrieval, and automated agents all consume your content the same way assistive technology does — by reading structure, not pixels. They don’t see your hero image. They don’t care about your animation. They parse your headings, your alt text, your semantic markup, and your metadata. And if those things are missing or broken, the model builds an incomplete picture of your brand — and serves that incomplete picture to millions of people. Which means somewhere in your organisation right now, someone is writing a six-figure “AI-readiness strategy“ that recommends clean markup, logical heading hierarchy, structured content, and real text alternatives. Your accessibility team has been asking for the same things since 2019. They were told it wasn’t a priority. This is the AI strategy your accessibility team already wrote. They just didn’t have the budget line to prove it. Tori has spent years building content architecture for Australian Government digital services — environments where accessibility isn’t optional and where a missing heading level means real people can’t access critical information. This talk takes that experience and reframes it for the AI moment: what actually matters in your structure, what’s just theatre, and how to finally get accessibility funded by walking into the budget meeting and pointing at the AI line item. This is not a talk about adding AI features. It’s about recognising that the most effective AI strategy most organisations can adopt is finishing the accessibility work they quietly shelved three years ago.

Takeaways

A dual-audience audit framework you can run against your own products on Monday Why the most impactful “AI optimisation“ is boring, structural, and already in WCAG How to hijack the AI-readiness budget for the accessibility work that actually needed doing