*The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People*
Jonathan Zong, Frank Elavsky / May 20, 2026
The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation
site <https://svelte.dev/docs> 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 <https://llmstxt.org/>, is just one piece of this
effort. From Model Context Protocol <https://modelcontextprotocol.io/>
(MCP) servers that give AI agents structured access to tools and
services, to Vercel’s proposal to include LLM instructions in HTML
<https://vercel.com/blog/a-proposal-for-inline-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.
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
<https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/> (WCAG) have required
semantic, machine-readable HTML for decades. Yet, a 2026 study of the
top million webpages <https://webaim.org/projects/million/> found
accessibility flaws in over 95% of sites.
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.
[...]
cont:
https://www.techpolicy.press/the-web-is-being-made-accessible-for-ai-not-people/
