The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People | TechPolicy.PressPerspective<br>The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People<br>Jonathan Zong, Frank Elavsky / May 20, 2026Elise Racine & The Bigger Picture / Better Images of AI / Web of Influence I / CC-BY 4.0

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The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: “If you’re an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format. Beep boop.” Svelte is participating in a broader movement to make the web legible and navigable to AI systems. The specific convention it adopted, llms.txt, is just one piece of this effort. From Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that give AI agents structured access to tools and services, to Vercel’s proposal to include LLM instructions in HTML, the trend is clear. The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user.<br>What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. Yet, the framing on Svelte’s site sends an unfortunate message. When the audience is AI, accommodation is offered with a wink. Beep boop! But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have required semantic, machine-readable HTML for decades. Yet, a 2026 study of the top million webpages found accessibility flaws in over 95% of sites.<br>The overlap between what AI agents need and what screen reader users need, however, is narrower than it appears. Screen reader users require not only plaintext, but also structure: heading hierarchies that allow jumping between sections, landmark regions, descriptive link text, and alt text for images. WCAG requires semantic HTML because screen reader users navigate content sequentially and depend on structural cues to find specific information.<br>A format like llms.txt goes in the opposite direction, flattening documentation into undifferentiated plaintext that a language model can ingest wholesale but that offers a screen reader user nothing to navigate by. And as large language models gain the ability to process images natively, AI-optimized pages have diminishing incentive to include alt text at all—even though blind users still depend on it. The risk is not only that these accommodations fail to help disabled users, but also that developers begin treating "machine-readable" as synonymous with "accessible," checking a box that was never truly checked.<br>This is not the curb cut effect—the oft-referenced idea that accommodations designed for disabled people ultimately benefit everyone. It is closer to the inverse: an accommodation built to serve a well-capitalized technological system that incidentally happens to address a need disabled people have long articulated without sufficient response.<br>It’s easy to forget that the curb cut, now widely taken for granted, was not given freely. In the early 1970s, disabled activists in Berkeley, California, wheeled themselves to intersections at night and poured their own cement ramps. Police threatened them with arrest. Though the curb cut effect is often invoked as a feel-good story about universal design, the original curb cuts were won through direct action, litigation, and political organizing.<br>Disability scholars have argued that the curb cut narrative, however well-intentioned, has been used to erase disabled people from their own innovations by justifying accessibility investments only when they can be shown to benefit non-disabled people. This emerging pattern takes that erasure a step further. The accommodation is not being built for disabled people at all, but for AI companies. Political will, funding, and urgency materialize only because the tech industry needs the same thing that disabled communities could not get on the basis of their civil rights.<br>This is not an isolated case. Consider road markings, a mundane feature of transportation infrastructure, that nevertheless carries significant consequences for both human drivers and autonomous vehicles. In a 2016 press demonstration in Los Angeles, a semi-autonomous Volvo repeatedly refused to move because its cameras could not detect the faded lane markings. Volvo’s North American CEO reportedly yelled at the Mayor of LA, “You need to paint the bloody roads here!”<br>As early as 2013, General Motors testified before the US Congress that for autonomous vehicles, “one of the key highway needs is to provide—at a minimum—clearly marked lanes and shoulders.” The resulting push for standardized, high-contrast, well-maintained road markings, culminating in 2022...