Accessibility is the practice of building pages so people with diverse abilities and the assistive technologies they rely on — screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnifiers, captions — can perceive, operate, and understand the content.
| Term | Accessibility |
|---|---|
| Category | Structured Data, Social and Media |
| Also known as | A11y |
| Where it appears | Page structure and media guidance |
What it means in RankGear
Inside RankGear, Accessibility surfaces through the page-structure and media guidance that inspects how a page is marked up and presented. The checks look at whether images carry meaningful alternative text, whether headings form a logical order, whether interactive elements can be reached without a mouse, and whether media has text equivalents. These are the same structural cues that assistive technology depends on to interpret a page, so RankGear treats them as part of how well a page communicates its content rather than as a cosmetic detail.
How to interpret it
Read Accessibility findings as a description of whether the markup genuinely describes the visible page. An alt attribute should name what an image actually shows, a heading should introduce the section beneath it, and a label should match the control it names — the markup exists to represent real, visible content, not to inject claims a sighted user would never see. When RankGear reports that ranking pages consistently supply a structural element that your target page omits, treat that as a gap worth closing on its own merits; accessible structure is a comparative signal about page quality, not a lever that directly moves rankings.
Example
You audit a product landing page and RankGear flags that its three hero images have empty alt attributes and that the page jumps from an h1 straight to an h3, skipping the h2 level. A screen-reader user would hear “image” three times with no description and lose the section hierarchy. Adding descriptive alt text and restoring the heading order makes the page legible to assistive technology and, incidentally, gives search engines a clearer map of what each section covers.
Important considerations
- Accessibility describes how usable a page is for people and assistive technology; it is not a Google ranking score, and improving it does not by itself make a page rank.
- Comparative findings — “ranking pages tend to include this element” — are indicators drawn from the pages RankGear examined, not proof that the element causes the ranking. Correlation is not causation.
- Meeting a technical check (a present alt attribute, a labeled field) does not guarantee real usability if the text is inaccurate or unhelpful; the markup should describe content a user can actually perceive.
- Standards such as WCAG define conformance levels; RankGear’s guidance points to common structural gaps but is not a substitute for a full accessibility audit.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.