For as long as I can remember, Google has always said it has to crawl, index and rank and imperfect web. That means broken markup, grammar and typos, sites not built with accessibility in mind and so forth. John Mueller of Google was asked if he thinks accessibility would ever be a Google ranking factor.

John responded to that on Twitter saying “I won’t say never.” He added “but I’m not aware of any immediate plans.”

John said that over time, maybe sites that do not take accessibility seriously may start to not rank well for other reasons. He said “In general though, when sites are hard to use, people steer away from them anyway, so over time things like recommendations & other signals tend to drop away, resulting in the site being less visible in search too.”

But will Google ever use accessibility specifically in its ranking algorithm?

Forum discussion at Twitter.