Answers about web accessibility, SEO, AEO, GEO and CRO

Web accessibility means designing and building websites so that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and use them. That includes people who are blind or have low vision, are deaf or hard of hearing, have motor or cognitive disabilities, or use assistive technology such as screen readers, keyboards or voice control. Accessible websites are also easier for everyone to use.

WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the international standard for web accessibility, published by the W3C. The current version is WCAG 2.2. It has three conformance levels: A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the target most organizations, policies and laws refer to.

WCAG is built on four principles, known as POUR. Content must be Perceivable (people can see or hear it), Operable (people can use it with a keyboard and other tools), Understandable (clear language and predictable behavior) and Robust (works with assistive technologies).

Start with an automated accessibility checker such as CoreA11y, then test manually: use your site with only a keyboard, try a screen reader, zoom to 200%, and check color contrast. Automated tools find only part of all issues, so a manual review or expert audit is needed for a complete picture.

The most common issues are images without alt text, low color contrast, form fields without labels, empty links and buttons, a missing page language, skipped heading levels and content that can't be reached with a keyboard. Most are quick to fix once you know where they are.

No. Overlays add a toolbar or script on top of a website but leave most underlying problems in the code. Many accessibility experts and disabled users advise against relying on them. Lasting accessibility comes from fixing the website itself, which is the approach CoreA11y and MSACAlab take.

In many places, yes, depending on your country, sector and size. Examples include the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the US, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in the EU, the Equality Act 2010 in the UK and the AODA in Ontario, Canada. Most of these point to WCAG as the technical benchmark.

ADA website compliance usually means making a business website usable by people with disabilities, in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA does not name a technical standard for private businesses, but WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA is the benchmark most often used. In 2024 the US Department of Justice adopted WCAG 2.1 AA for state and local government websites.

The European Accessibility Act is an EU law that requires many products and services, including e-commerce, banking, e-books and transport services, to be accessible. It has applied since 28 June 2025. Very small businesses providing services may be exempt. The related European standard, EN 301 549, is based on WCAG.

In some countries, yes. In the US, thousands of website accessibility lawsuits and demand letters are filed each year, many against small and mid-sized businesses. Fixing issues, documenting your work and publishing an accessibility statement are practical ways to lower your risk.

No. No tool, audit or service can honestly guarantee legal compliance or prevent legal claims. Be wary of any product that promises it. What you can do is find and fix issues, test regularly and keep records of your efforts.

CoreA11y is an accessibility plugin that audits your website against WCAG 2.2 AA, fixes common issues automatically with one-click undo, and guides you through the rest in plain language. It is made by MSACAlab and is available for WordPress, with Shopify, Squarespace and Mobile App Audit (for iOS and Android apps) coming soon.

Install a WordPress accessibility plugin that audits and fixes real issues, such as CoreA11y. Run an audit, turn on the safe quick fixes, fix content issues like missing alt text, then work through a manual checklist for keyboard use, contrast and readable content. Re-audit to confirm your progress.

Yes. CoreA11y Lite is free forever and includes full-site audits, 12 quick fixes with undo, PDF reports, before-and-after comparisons and an accessibility statement. CoreA11y Pro adds more fixes, scheduled audits and more, from $19 a month.

No. CoreA11y does not add a toolbar to your site. It fixes the code your visitors get and shows you what still needs a person, so the improvements are real.

Not yet. CoreA11y is available for WordPress today. CoreA11y for Shopify, PDF Remediation, Mobile App Audit for iOS and Android apps and CoreA11y for Squarespace are coming soon. Each page has a waitlist, and our team can help by hand in the meantime.

Yes. Every fix is logged and can be undone with one click, either one at a time or as a batch, and you can redo an undo.

No. Scans and checking engines run only in your WordPress admin, never for visitors. In our tests, pages loaded no slower with CoreA11y installed, and turning on every Lite quick fix added under 2 KB to a page (about 7.5 KB with every Pro fix on).

They stop straight away and your site looks exactly as it did before. CoreA11y applies its fixes as each page is shown and never rewrites your theme or content, so there is nothing to clean up. Changes you make yourself, such as alt text you add in the Media Library or edits to a page, are yours and stay. If you deactivate, your settings and audit history are kept for when you come back.

CoreA11y combines three layers of checks: axe-core, selected IBM Equal Access rules and its own rule-based checks, at desktop and phone width. In our tests on a public benchmark of 142 known accessibility problems, it flagged about half automatically or for a human check, and its 32-step checklist guides you through the rest. Anything it can't decide for sure is listed as "Needs a human check" rather than guessed.

Digital accessibility services help organizations make websites, apps and documents usable by people with disabilities. They usually include accessibility audits, remediation (fixing issues), user testing, training, accessibility statements and ongoing monitoring.

A website accessibility audit is a structured review of your site against WCAG, combining automated scans with expert manual testing. It produces a list of issues, where they are, who they affect and how to fix them, ranked by priority.

Prices vary widely, from a few hundred to many thousands of dollars depending on site size and depth. The complete MSACAlab audit costs $89 and covers accessibility plus measurement, SEO, AEO/GEO and CRO. Remediation starts at $249 for sites under 50 pages.

Accessibility remediation is the work of fixing the issues an audit finds: adding alt text, correcting contrast, labelling forms, repairing keyboard navigation, restructuring headings and more. It should end with re-testing to confirm the fixes work.

Automated testing uses software to scan pages quickly for issues that can be detected by rules, such as missing alt text. Manual testing uses people, keyboards and screen readers to judge things software can't, such as whether alt text is meaningful or a page makes sense. You need both.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of improving a website so it appears higher in unpaid search results on engines like Google and Bing. It covers technical health, content quality, on-page optimization and links from other websites.

Technical SEO makes sure search engines can crawl, render and index your website. It covers site speed, mobile-friendliness, site structure, internal links, sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical tags, structured data and fixing broken pages.

An SEO audit reviews technical health, indexing, page titles and meta descriptions, headings, content quality, internal linking, page speed, mobile usability and backlinks, then lists the fixes most likely to improve visibility.

AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the practice of structuring your content so search engines and AI assistants can pull it out as a direct answer. Think featured snippets, "People also ask" boxes, voice assistants and AI-generated answers.

SEO aims to rank your pages in search results so people click through. AEO aims to make your content the answer itself, shown directly in a snippet, voice reply or AI summary. Good AEO builds on good SEO.

Use real questions as headings, answer them in the first sentence, keep answers short and factual, and add detail after. Add structured data such as FAQPage, HowTo and Organization schema, keep content up to date, and show who wrote it and why they're qualified.

GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of making your brand and content more likely to be mentioned, summarized and cited by generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.

Start with a GEO audit to see how AI tools describe you today. Then make sure AI crawlers can access your important pages, publish clear and factual answers to the questions your customers ask, add structured data, show author expertise, cite sources, earn mentions on trusted sites and track AI referral traffic in your analytics. MSACAlab includes GEO in every $89 audit.

AI tools tend to cite pages that are easy to crawl, clearly answer a specific question, are well structured and come from sources that others trust and mention. Focus on original, accurate content, clear headings, up-to-date facts and a consistent brand presence across the web. No one can guarantee a citation.

AEO focuses on being picked as the direct answer to a question in search features and assistants. GEO focuses on being included and cited in longer AI-generated responses. They overlap heavily, and the same groundwork helps both.

CRO, or conversion rate optimization, is the process of increasing the share of website visitors who take a desired action, such as buying, signing up, booking or getting in touch. It uses data, user research and testing to remove friction.

It depends on your industry, traffic source, price point and what counts as a conversion. Industry averages are a rough guide only. The most useful benchmark is your own: measure it accurately, then improve it step by step.

Make your value clear above the fold, speed up your pages, simplify forms and checkout, add trust signals such as reviews and guarantees, make calls to action obvious, fix accessibility barriers and test changes with A/B tests.

It can. Barriers like unlabelled form fields, low contrast or buttons that don't work with a keyboard stop people from completing a purchase. Removing them lets more visitors finish what they came to do, and clearer design helps everyone.

Website measurement is how you collect and analyze data about visitors and what they do, using tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager. Accurate measurement shows which pages, channels and campaigns actually bring results.

GA4, or Google Analytics 4, is Google's current analytics platform. It replaced Universal Analytics in 2023 and measures user actions as events, which makes setting up key events (formerly called conversions) essential.

Common causes are duplicate or missing tracking tags, key events that aren't set up, consent settings that block tracking, bot traffic, broken cross-domain tracking and internal traffic that isn't filtered out. A measurement audit finds and fixes these.