The accessibility gap in mainstream news publishing

For all the talk of engagement strategies and platform optimisation, mainstream news publishing continues to face a quiet but critical failure: it remains fundamentally inaccessible to many of the very audiences it claims to serve.

Accessibility is often reduced to compliance. It’s treated as a box-ticking exercise—alt text for images, keyboard navigation, screen-reader compatibility. These technical standards matter, and they’re non-negotiable. But they only begin to address the broader question: Who is your journalism actually for—and who is quietly excluded from it?

Accessibility is not simply about disability. It is about literacy, cognitive load, design clarity, economic barriers, and language. It is about ensuring that journalism, in its most public form, is available and usable by as many people as possible. And in this broader sense, the gap remains wide.

Information that’s technically available isn’t always truly accessible

Many news websites today are labyrinthine. Autoplay videos, intrusive ads, complex navigation, and dense article formatting make them difficult not only for screen readers, but for anyone without perfect vision, cognitive fluency, or broadband-speed patience.

For readers with learning disabilities, neurodivergence, or lower literacy levels, these interfaces can be actively alienating. What appears to be a rich information environment is, for many, a thicket of noise and distraction.

Moreover, much of the content is written in ways that exclude without intending to. Long, jargon-heavy articles assume a background knowledge many readers may not have. Headlines are crafted for SEO or irony rather than clarity. Key facts are buried under context, or fragmented across sidebars and inline links.

Journalism cannot claim to inform the public if large parts of the public cannot process the information being delivered.

Accessibility is not the enemy of quality

There remains a misconception—especially in legacy newsrooms—that simplifying content for broader accessibility dilutes its intellectual seriousness. That clarity must come at the expense of rigour. That designing for low vision, low bandwidth, or low literacy users means lowering the standard.

This is false. Accessibility done well elevates journalism. It requires editors to write more precisely, not less thoughtfully. It demands that stories be structured clearly, not simplistically. And it forces design and product teams to remove friction points that benefit all users, not just a subset.

In short, accessible content is often better content—for everyone.

The economic cost of exclusion

Accessibility is sometimes seen as a moral imperative. It is. But it is also a business imperative.

The failure to accommodate different needs is a failure to capture potential audiences. Roughly one in five people globally lives with some form of disability. Millions more deal with situational or temporary impairments—ageing eyesight, poor connectivity, stress-induced inattention. Add to this the growing population of readers for whom English is not a first language, and the scale of the missed opportunity becomes clear.

Inaccessible design isn’t just unethical. It’s commercially self-defeating.

The platform paradox

Even as mainstream publishers struggle with on-site accessibility, they often push content through platforms that are more accessible—whether by accident or design. Social media platforms offer simpler layouts, clearer threading, and adjustable viewing settings. Audio summaries or video explainers on TikTok and Instagram often convey core messages more effectively than the original article.

This inversion—where the publisher’s owned product is harder to navigate than the algorithmic platform—should be cause for reflection. If users can better engage with your content off-platform, the issue is not their behaviour. It’s your infrastructure.

Moving from compliance to inclusion

Real accessibility begins with a shift in mindset: from compliance to inclusion. This means embedding accessibility in editorial planning, product development, and audience strategy from the start—not retrofitting it as an afterthought.

It means:

• Testing designs with disabled users, not just usability consultants

• Writing for clarity without condescension

• Offering multiple content formats—text, audio, simplified explainers

• Designing pages for attention, not distraction

• Removing unnecessary logins, paywall confusion, and readability barriers

It also means listening more closely to underserved audiences. Accessibility is not static. It evolves with technology, habits, and cultural expectations. Staying ahead of the curve requires more than guidelines—it requires engagement.

Journalism that doesn’t reach is journalism that doesn’t count

In a moment where trust is fragile, reach is plateauing, and public discourse is increasingly fractured, accessibility is not a peripheral concern. It is central. It is what ensures that journalism is not just produced—but received, understood, and acted upon.

The accessibility gap in news publishing is not only about technology. It is about editorial responsibility. If newsrooms want to remain relevant to the public, they must ensure they are actually serving the public—in all its diversity, complexity, and capability.

Anything less isn’t just inaccessible. It’s inadequate.