Adrian Roselli Calls Foul on Accessibility-Plus-AEO Pitching

Accessibility consultant Adrian Roselli has published a pointed argument that companies now selling "accessible and AI-ready" or "agent friendly" work — often bundled with SEO — are misrepresenting what accessibility does. His verdict is blunt: "Now I see companies pitching accessible & 'AI-ready' or 'agent friendly' work, often still including SEO. I'm calling foul."

Roselli, a long-time accessibility practitioner, built a three-circle Venn diagram to map where he believes the fields actually intersect. The diagram, published alongside his post and built on a CSS Venn technique from 2018, defines the circles precisely:

• Accessibility: the work needed to make things accessible to humans in assorted contexts.
• SEO: the work needed to get sites into search engines and perhaps ranked well.
• AEO/GEO: the work to get your content taken by LLMs, which request pages at volume, so it can later be incorrectly reproduced.

The diagram's sharpest claim is structural: there is no overlap between accessibility and AEO/GEO, and no intersection of all three circles. Where SEO and AEO/GEO overlap, Roselli writes, "this is someone tricking you into speed-running having your IP stolen."

What is the relationship between SEO and accessibility?

Roselli frames SEO-as-accessibility-justification as a limited foot-in-the-door tactic — one aimed at bosses, clients, and stakeholders who treat accessibility as a cost center and respond to dashboards and money. "Ideally, you want to get past that ASAP to drive better outcomes for humans, not SERPs," he writes.

His concern is not theoretical. He lists concrete patterns where SEO pressure degraded accessibility:

• alt text keyword stuffing;
• low-contrast text;
• verbose headings;
• link text built around keywords;
• gratuitous landing pages.

He also points to analysis by Karl, at afixt.com, demonstrating how little the two disciplines are actually connected. That disconnect is why he has always been wary of firms marketing accessibility and SEO as a package.

What did LLM vendors ask developers to do?

Roselli links the new pitching pattern to guidance he documented in October 2025 from LLM companies requesting their own notion of accessible sites — guidance he calls anti-user. His comparison cuts at the capability gap: these tools "can't handle a general site most kids navigate with ease." His worry is that teams will respond by adding misunderstood ARIA attributes across pages rather than questioning the technology's failure.

The pattern he describes has a known failure mode. ARIA misapplied tends to break semantics for assistive technology users rather than improve them, which is the opposite of what the guidance promises.

Why does the distinction matter for practitioners?

Roselli's core position is that accessibility is about people. Twisting that human-centered purpose to serve corporate automation efforts is, for him, a signal about how seriously a vendor takes the work. He allows nuance: "If it sells work and you still focus on humans first, cool."

But the signal reads differently to him: "But to me that signal says you aren't serious about the work." He references the TESCREAL cluster of ideologies as what he expects to find underneath the veneer, while noting he is trying to be less absolutist in his judgments.

For practitioners evaluating vendors, the test Roselli implies is simple: does the proposal describe outcomes for disabled users in context, or does it describe machine legibility? The Venn diagram gives teams a way to ask that question visually before the sales conversation starts.

Roselli says he built the diagram, rendered as an interactive CodePen, "to better illustrate where I see the overlaps." Expect the accessibility-versus-AEO boundary question to sharpen as more LLM vendors publish site-authoring guidance of their own.