Stop Retrofitting Accessibility. Start Publishing Born Accessible Content

When people think about web accessibility, they often think about design challenges: color contrast, keyboard navigation, and focus indicators. Those are critical, and they're typically handled by your web development and design teams.

But there's another side to accessibility that's just as important: content accessibility. The alt text on your images, your heading structure, the way you write link text. These are content decisions that, in most cases, only you can fix.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most websites have content accessibility barriers. Not because anyone wants them to be there. Not because people don't care. But because most content managers are expected to know accessibility rules. They often don’t. As a result, the average website has 51 accessibility errors per page, according to WebAIM's 2025 report.

The solution isn't more complicated or additional tools. It's putting clear, actionable accessibility guidance directly in your hands, right where you're creating and publishing content.

The Knowledge and Workflow Gap

Creating accessible content requires understanding rules most content creators have never been taught.

• What makes alt text meaningful?
• When should you use a heading versus bold text?
• Why is "click here" problematic for screen reader users?

When I led a web development team at another organization, I saw this play out constantly: content owners would write in Google Docs with no accessibility guidance, send it to us for publishing, and we'd discover issues we couldn't fix ourselves. Missing alt text? We needed them to describe the image. Improper headings? They had to restructure them. So the content went back. Under deadline pressure, issues got flagged for "later,” and "later" often meant never.

This isn't a people problem. It's a knowledge gap combined with a workflow gap.

Bringing Accessibility to Content Creators

Today, we're introducing a quality assistant in Content Publisher. It's an intelligent review system that checks content accessibility in Google Docs and soon Microsoft Word, right where you're already writing and publishing.

The quality assistant was born from Pantheon's 2026 Hackathon.

The result is a feature that works in your writing space, catching issues before you publish:

• Missing or improper alt text on images.
• Improper heading hierarchy and structure.
• Non-descriptive link text like "click here".

Here's what makes it different: you don't just get told what's wrong. You get clear guidance on why it matters for users with disabilities and how to fix it. And for many issues, a suggested fix you can accept with one click. See an issue like "Missing alt text – Sunset over a suspension bridge"? Click "Accept" and it's fixed. Right there. No copying and pasting. No hunting through your document. No wondering if you did it correctly.

Then publish directly to your website.

The quality assistant won't catch every possible accessibility issue. Automated tools have limits, and accessibility is complex. True accessibility requires manual testing and input from people with disabilities. But the quality assistant helps catch many of the most common problems that create barriers for users, when they're easiest to fix: during creation, with clear guidance and one-click fixes, before you publish.

Beyond Accessibility

Content Publisher already connects Google Docs and soon Microsoft Word directly to your website. Now, with the quality assistant, you're not just publishing faster. You're publishing higher-quality content in a single workflow.

Accessibility is the first capability of a bigger vision for the quality assistant. Here’s what else is in store:

• Brand compliance - Ensure content follows your style guidelines and voice before it goes live.
• SEO optimization - Get recommendations to improve search performance while you write.
• Fact-checking - Flag content that needs verification during creation, not after publication.
• Legal review - Identify content that may require legal or compliance review before publishing.

Get Started Today

The quality assistant with accessibility checking is available now in Content Publisher at no additional cost. If you're already using Content Publisher, you have it. If you're not, get started for free.

Because accessible content isn't something you retrofit. It's something you create from the start. And now, you have the tools to check it and publish it yourself—all from Google Docs (and soon from Word).

Learn more about the quality assistant.