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Maxwell Ivey is almost totally blind. Retinitis pigmentosa left him with light perception and nothing else, and he’s been a carnival owner, an amusement equipment broker, a life goals coach and an online media publicist. Today he’s known as The Blind Blogger, and through The Accessibility Advantage he writes, speaks and consults on digital accessibility. When I asked him how marketers should think about it, he started somewhere I didn’t expect: nobody is leaving people out on purpose. Subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next conversation lands in your feed.
And I like to tell people I understand that the lack of inclusion has nothing to do with mean spirits. – Maxwell Ivey
Most sites aren’t inaccessible on purpose
His read is that business owners and small agencies already have a full list, and accessibility shows up as one more task outside their expertise. “It’s just they don’t know or if they do know they’re not exactly sure what they’re supposed to do about it.”
So he leads with the fixes that help everybody. He cited a study he’d run across that said 37% of people under 40 won’t watch a video without closed captions, hearing loss or not. Inverting text from black on white to white on black is easier with vision loss, and it’s also easier to read on a phone in very bright or very dim light. Breaking a long form into several screens helps people on mobile most of all. You don’t have to sell accessibility as charity. You can sell it as better UX that happens to include more people.
Keyboard first, because the mouse fails at checkout
Most of the technology that makes a screen usable for someone with vision loss hamstrings the mouse. Maxwell can sometimes simulate a click, “but quite often that simulation doesn’t work when I need it to work the most, like the last button of a checkout system.”
We can’t always depend on the mouse or the track pad, but we can always depend on the keyboard. – Maxwell Ivey
Hovers, swipes and rotors are fine, as long as you start with a site that works from the keyboard alone. Here’s a five-minute test you can run today: put your mouse in a drawer and try to buy something from your own site with the Tab and Enter keys. If you get stuck, so does a screen reader user.
Headings are the one fix he’d pick first
A screen reader moves through a page from the top left to the top right, then down a row, and it stops on links, buttons, labeled images, labeled video and frames. To find the actual text, Maxwell uses arrow keys plus heading navigation. On a site he’s visited before, he skips straight down the page by headings.
If I were going to pick one of the things we’ve talked about and say, it’s the most important thing, it would be headings. – Maxwell Ivey
And the first thing he usually hears on a website is the logo. You know what most people’s alt text says for it? “Logo or banner.” Then comes the menu, then maybe some content. The button that turns on a site’s accessibility features is usually sitting right before the footer, the last place anyone using a screen reader will reach.
Maxwell’s view is that search engines, and the AI crawlers now hitting your site, are checking the same basics: proper headings, clearly labeled buttons and links, and alt text on images. Google hasn’t said accessibility is a direct ranking factor, so treat that part as his opinion. But Google’s own image guidance asks for descriptive alt text, and clean headings help every machine reading your page, so the same fix pays twice. If you want a starting list, work through a technical audit checklist and add a keyboard-only pass on top. Erika Braeger made the machine side of this argument in machine readability for LLMs.
Alt text should say why the image is there
I asked about commercial real estate, where somebody stages a lobby beautifully, uploads it as 0017.jpg with an alt tag of “lobby,” and lists it as “office space.” Maxwell’s ideal is that you put as much effort into the alt text as you did into making the image. His realistic ask is a template, so you stop having to think about it each time, plus a focus on how the image helps a buyer decide.
So how about we just meet each other halfway and y’all try to use half that 150 characters for descriptive language and half for keywords. – Maxwell Ivey
His working number is that search engines only index the first 150 to 180 characters of alt text. Google doesn’t publish a cutoff, but short and specific wins either way. For listings and car lots, he’d often rather get one audio-described video or slideshow than 40 tagged stills.
When I pushed with an example of two men shaking hands, he said it depends on the message. If the handshake only celebrates a closed sale, a physical description adds little. If who is shaking hands is the point, say so. “Descriptions are important if the description is the reason for having the image.” The floor doesn’t move, though: if an image is on your site, it needs alt text of some kind, “because if it doesn’t, screen readers cannot see it. It doesn’t exist.”
The disability tax works in your favor
Maxwell compared it to the pink tax. People with disabilities often pay more, because so few companies make the effort, and they stay loyal to the ones that do.
I mean, when it comes to consumer loyalty, we will actually overpay. We consider it a value added aspect of a product. – Maxwell Ivey
Build an accessible campaign for a product his community needs, and “more often than not, we’re going to be those influencers, influencers that you probably won’t even have to pay.” He lives this himself. He stayed on Zoom instead of moving to Riverside, the tool we recorded this on, because Zoom gives him keyboard navigation and almost fully labeled buttons. He prefers Walmart to Amazon because the navigation and checkout make more sense with a screen reader. And a car salesman told him about a blind customer who walked away from a Dodge truck for a Chevy because the Chevy had physical controls for the heat and the radio instead of a touchscreen.
Big companies with budgets and teams still get this wrong, which is the opening. In his words, it’s “a place where the smaller companies can get a competitive advantage by investing a little bit of time and effort in accessibility.”
Minimalism, minimalism, minimalism
When I said a picture that tells no story might not need to be on the page at all, Maxwell agreed: “minimalism, minimalism, minimalism.” Adaptive tech makes every page slower to move through, so every extra link, image and menu item costs something. If a page doesn’t need to be in your homepage menu, take it out. If information doesn’t explain what you do, how you do it or why someone should care, it doesn’t need to be on the homepage.
One part of accessibility I really like to talk about is making the most important thing the most important thing. – Maxwell Ivey
That lines up with a test I run with clients. Copy the text off a page, paste it into a blank document, and ask whether a stranger could tell what you do and why you’re different. A screen reader user gets roughly that version of your site. Maxwell said he was going to go run it on his own homepage after we stopped recording. Will you?
Connect with Maxwell Ivey
- Website: The Accessibility Advantage
- Speaking and workshops: book Maxwell to speak
- The Blind Blogger: theblindblogger.net
- Podcast: The Accessibility Advantage on Apple Podcasts
More episodes like this one live in Technical SEO: Real Talk from Expert Practitioners.
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
