Sad truth: we are making the web accessible for AIs, not for people.
Some sites now offer a text version for LLMs, but still skip real accessibility needs like proper heading structure, landmarks that screen reader users need.
https://www.techpolicy.press/the-web-is-being-made-accessible-for-ai-not-people/
It's not just the web, accommodations disability advocates pushed for years are only showing up now to help delivery robots. Zong and Elavsky call this the "ramping automation effect". And worse: those robots are causing harm to disabled people. Ironic, isn’t it?
In the end, if we let AI "solve" accessibility as a side effect, we're basically saying that disabled people's needs were never enough on their own. Accessibility is a civil right, not a byproduct.
Jul 6, 2026, 12:46 PM@stephaniewalter Exactly. CSS debug also still a human job. By the time I tell AI what to do, I had finished.
@stephaniewalter this this this! I wish I could boost this more than once. :)
@stephaniewalter wait have they re-named the curb cut effect??? The irony!
@bright_helpings yes, I think that was exactly the point. The author used it as base to show how ridiculous it was that, we need robots to "require" something to make it happen, since humans requiring is was not enough.
@stephaniewalter I've seen so much more ink spilled about how robotaxis get around cities than I do about how I a blind pedestrian am meant to get around cities (especially if they're going to have robotaxis in them!).
@bright_helpings yeah, it's infuriating. People will only care about money, not other fellow humans.
Jul 6, 2026, 1:22 PM@alice We never learn from our past mistakes. I remember those times because it brought a big confusion: people thought that "accessibility" meant "being able to access on mobile phones with slow connection". Well, you need that too, but, that's not the current definition of the word.
Jul 14, 2026, 1:22 PM@stephaniewalter I saw this WHATWG github issue today:
Proposal: agent-discoverable page metadata #12683
Evidently the site-wide LLM policies are insufficiently granular and they want a standard for per-page AI agent-specific instructions 🙄
@ansuz @stephaniewalter would like to have a manual for making my website inaccessible / deliver garbage to "AI"
@kdekooter @ansuz @stephaniewalter https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/ works quite well for exactly that purpose on my end
@tante @kdekooter @ansuz @stephaniewalter
I run it as well and while the website does not look very accessible, the setup instructions are.
I run it as docker and the step by step instructions are very easy to follow.
@stephaniewalter great article, fuck the bots. I'm over here scraping Zillow just to implement get half decent filters buy smaltman gets the goddamn red carpet
@stephaniewalter AI becomes more and more like cars.
Jul 14, 2026, 6:56 PM@stephaniewalter didn't read the article yet, but i bet 5 boosts that the actual reason is self defense. This way the million and one genAI crawlers will only produce traffic in megabytes instead of gigabytes.
@stephaniewalter adding to this: companies are now making the core on-page content for AIs rather than people. Pre-ChatGPT, there was already a tendency to optimize for search engines in ways that sometimes reduced content quality for humans, but it's getting worse now that everyone in marketing is optimizing for AI search placement.