Jesse: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, a podcast about the role hosting plays in shaping the open web. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. On this show, we go deeper than uptime and dashboards. We talk about hosting as infrastructure, about ownership, independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses, and the internet itself. Before we dive in, head to impressive.host. That’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and help shape future conversations. You’ll also find links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen. Today with me, I have Anne-Mieke Bovelett, accessibility strategist, someone that I met at WordCamp Europe 2026. We had a great conversation, and I thought it’d be awesome to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about where you’re from, what you’re working on, and why you’re joining us today?

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Hey, Jesse, thank you for having me. I too enjoyed that conversation. We did meet before, but we were always running past each other on three occasions at CloudFest probably.

Jesse: That’s true.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, more about me. I was born and raised in the Netherlands. I come from an artist family, and creative blood has been flowing through my veins for years. But I have this commercial gene that no one knows where it came from. I got into web design part-time in the end of the ’90s, and I went full-time after that. I became my own boss, as we say. I’d been creating websites, print work, the whole thing, full-service agency. Then six years ago, I discovered I was slamming doors in people’s faces digitally for years. This is where my whole life turned upside down, because I went back to what I’d built and I went into the rabbit hole of learning about accessibility. I quickly learned that it’s not that complicated. There’s a lot of information, but it’s not complicated to learn how to test, to become a certified tester, and to do the practical work. But a lot of people in accessibility do suffer from the ignorance of their management. That’s why I’m now not just an accessibility specialist, I’m a strategist. I go one level higher in companies. I talk to the C-suite and convince them to shift left on digital accessibility because it’s important for people. And since people stop caring as soon as they have to pull their wallet, I just use the argument of how much revenue they’re losing or how many unnecessary support costs they’re carrying because of that. I don’t have an opinion on why someone makes something accessible. That’s just tiring. But I do care that they do make something accessible. So if I have to goad them with their wallet, I’ll do that.

Jesse: I like that. You’re tailoring the message to something that executives are going to care about on their bottom line. That’s what stuck out to me in the conversation we had. We were hanging out at the speakers’ dinner at WordCamp Europe. You caught me as I was walking by. You said, “We keep passing each other, we’ve gotta put an end to it, sit down and have a conversation.” And we did, and it was a great conversation. It helped me understand more of the nuances of accessibility, things I hadn’t considered before. For everybody at home, let’s take a step back. When we talk about accessibility, when we say we’re making a site accessible, what does that actually mean?

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It means that we ensure it is designed, but also technically, because design is actually how it works, in such a way that anyone can use it despite any disabilities they have. Whether they can’t use their arms, their eyes, or their ears, basically anyone who is normally confronted with hurdles that we create, we take those hurdles away. I always have something in front of me with the full definition of digital accessibility because otherwise I always forget something. Do you mind if I read it to you? It is the inclusive practice of designing and building websites, apps, digital documents, and technologies so that people with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive disabilities can use them effectively. It ensures that equal access and equal opportunity is there by removing those digital barriers. And that’s basically it. It’s very good to remember this definition, because people always say, “Oh, that’s for blind people, right?” But it’s for a massive group of people. It is also for your grandmother who you want to stop calling you when she tries to shop online.

Jesse: I like that you’re finding another way to make it a message that people are going to actually relate to.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah.

Jesse: That’s a real one for sure. It’s funny because one of the things I was thinking about from our initial conversation is this idea that I kind of understood my own ignorance when I was younger. I had a friend who told me for a long time that her mother was blind. I never met her mother at that time, so I had this impression that she was completely sightless, a black void. Being a teenager, that’s what I thought was the definition of being blind. When I actually met her though, I found out that she’s able to get around. She can kind of see some light. Instead of everything being completely black, she can see shapes, see people as silhouettes. But that’s technically legally blind. It challenged my own bias, and I realized there’s so much more nuance to this stuff. Then later in life, my father became bound to a wheelchair. One of the things we had to start doing was calling around, because at that time we were living on Cape Cod, which is an interesting place. Cape Cod works very hard to preserve its culture and its feel of being an old fishing village. There are all these rules about upgrading buildings and changing the infrastructure, trying to hold everything in place. But it also meant that so many buildings were not wheelchair accessible. We’d call a restaurant and say, “Is your restaurant wheelchair accessible?” They’d say yes, but when we got there, we’d find a lip on the curb. Yes, once you’re above that lip it’s accessible, but you have to get above that lip first. People think they have a good understanding of what others are facing, but when you’re a mobile person who doesn’t deal with these things, it’s very easy to skip over them. That two-inch lip is not a hurdle for them. A lot of that translates into web design. We’re building these websites. We’re living in the browsers. We’re testing things ourselves. But if we don’t struggle with any of those disabilities ourselves, it’s hard to have true empathy and to fully understand it. So I’m curious, for someone whose heart’s in the right place, who wants to understand this stuff better but doesn’t have the experience or hasn’t lived with it firsthand, how do they start to understand what people are struggling with in website design?

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: I have a bunch of tools where I can emulate visual disabilities, for example. But I can also explain to people that if they put on loud music, classical on the left and jazz on the right, which are very nice as single things but together are a nightmare, and then they put something visually on the screen that looks like heavy metal, that is the world of someone with a cognitive disability because there is too much going on. I always try to put people in other people’s shoes, and one of the first things I do is say take your keyboard and start pressing the Tab key. Can you see where you are? Unfortunately, nine out of ten times people say, “Oh, nothing happens.” And I say, “Sure something happens, but the person who built your website forgot to put something in.” I’m very careful about immediately pointing fingers at a web agency or developer because I like to come from a place of yes. Because this is a painful thing we deal with in our job. We are always the bringers of bad news, and you want people to get into it with a positive mindset. Another thing I do is show them what the world looks like for someone who is color blind. One in 12 males born has some form of color blindness, and 0.5% of all women do too. People go, “0.5%, that’s nothing.” Yes, until you have a multimillion-dollar webshop selling women’s clothes. Then you have a massive problem. I also try to put them in their own shoes when they are much older. Then they start to realize, “If this doesn’t get fixed in the next X years, I will still be struggling with this myself.” And of course, the lure of making it super dramatic is always there. You want to transport that sense of being disabled from doing something. I’ll use examples like, you go to a store and there is not one label on any piece of clothing you want to buy. What do you do?

Jesse: Honestly, it depends on how bad I want the thing. But yeah.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Of course. And you start out in that store with a very negative feeling. And then if you go up to one of the salespeople, in America, I’ve learned by experience that people are extremely service-minded. They’re trained really well for that. Here in Germany, you can walk into a store and get a feeling like, “Oh, what are you doing here? Oh, you want to buy something. What an honor.” It’s the exact opposite. I ask people, imagine this is what your website is doing to your potential buyers. Those are the people who silently walk away. That’s what I do. And I always say ask questions, ask questions, ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question, because people go into a complete panic thinking, “Where do I start?”

Jesse: That’s interesting because when we start thinking about building a new website, at least in my experience working with agencies, they typically plan out how the website is going to be constructed. There’s time spent on wireframing, understanding the technology that needs to be present, then design, development, user experience, and all that. I don’t often see an agency putting a premium on time carved out for accessibility. It usually ends up being something like an optional add-on. “You really want your site to be accessible, it’s going to cost X more.” In your opinion, should the agency be building accessibility in by default? And realistically, knowing every project is different, what should we be thinking about in terms of time spent on accessibility? Is it as large as the overall design phase, or is it smaller?

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Not at all.

Jesse: Okay, good. I think there’s a misconception that it’s going to be a 50% addition to time and money to make it happen.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: First of all, every agency needs a mindset shift because accessibility is digital hygiene. Otherwise it’s like going to a restaurant and having the waiter ask, “Would you like plastic cutlery in our four-star restaurant, or would you like the silverware?” The only thing the restaurant had to do was use the silverware. Now, if agencies can get past their fear and put some money toward learning what accessibility means, because for every discipline inside an agency it means something different. And I’m saying this more often, especially in the WordPress world. We have this all-in-one culture that happened through page builders, and suddenly everyone could build a website. We had a lot of one-eyed people in the land of the blind pretending they knew what they were doing. You can’t even blame them. But you do have to know what you’re doing. I come from a generation where the graphic designer was a separate discipline from the developer, from the content person. When agencies find someone who guides them in each of these disciplines, they’ll find it’s actually incredibly easy. And I’ll be honest, I’m a bit gloating these days because the new world of AI and citations has made accessibility not an option anymore. What a screen reader or other assistive technology can’t do on a site, the AI agent also can’t do. So that is a very important part, and it’s about the user experience. Once agencies have this mindset shift and understand they need to approach this holistically, they’ll feel much more at ease. The developers start talking to people about the functionality on the website, and if they’ve been trained, they’re going to ask the right questions: “Can we do this by keyboard? Can we ensure this works with voice control?” Because in the end, writing the correct semantic code under the hood is easy. Really.

Jesse: I think that’s really interesting to hear because it’s a misconception that there’s a significant amount of extra work. I do like the idea that you’re aligning the need for crawlability and discoverability with accessibility, and that brings us back to whether advocates should care if an agency or host cares for a moral reason. I bring that up because previously to Automattic, I co-founded a company called Brute Protect, and we were trying hard to make people more aware of the security implications of putting a website on the internet. You mentioned that it got a lot easier to build a website, that the barrier to entry decreased immensely. When I think about that, I’m thinking about the small business owner, the merchant, someone who builds a website for themselves. They don’t necessarily understand why their site might be vulnerable or why it might be a target for security threats. For a long time I thought my job was to educate them on why they should care. I’d explain that your website can be an entry point for botnets to steal your server’s resources to go hack other sites. It’s all about this moral implication, this responsibility to the internet. And that doesn’t land very well. So then I shifted to, how much money is it going to cost you when your site gets hacked? Do you have backups ready? Do you have the tools to remove that hack? Are you going to lose customers because your site is down, or lose trust because they’re seeing inappropriate ads or malicious file downloads? For me, when I come to accessibility, my first instinct is to circle back to that moral reason. You should care because people viewing the internet deserve the right to a good experience. And while that may be true, it may not be moving the needle very much.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: It won’t move the needle. The only country I know where fear can move the needle is Germany. They are the best-insured people in the world. As a Dutch person, we make a lot of fun of them. I still care about them. I’m married to a German, but yeah. Security runs into that wall because fear doesn’t sell. Compassion sells until it costs. In hosting especially, it’s even harder. It’s like you feel like a screaming person alone in the desert. In both of our fields, it is no fun to eventually say, “I told you so.” There are no shortcuts to security. There are no shortcuts to accessibility. And there are no more shortcuts to SEO either. Same thing. It all correlates. It’s all about the human experience, but it’s also human nature to ask what’s in it for me. And now I gave this talk at WordCamp Europe. Did you see it?

Jesse: No, I didn’t actually. Sorry.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: That’s all right. I know what it’s like when you’re at a WordCamp.

Jesse: It’s on the playlist though. WordPress TV has all these talks available, and my favorite thing is to work with sound in the background and perk up when I hear something good. Your talk and a few others, I actually just got through listening to Monica from SiteGround’s marketing AI talk from that event. So it’s on the playlist.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Oh yeah. And you should see Emma Young’s talk. The team that coordinated the talks at WordCamp Europe did a massive job. They managed to build one talk upon another, upon another, upon another. They received around 450 applications, and Emma Young came right after me. We’d been talking before WordCamp, and she wove in AI and how important it is to think of the human experience. And sometimes, speaking of hosting companies, I’m surprised by how many hosting websites I visit and just think, “Whoa.” More people are getting into hosting now because of AI, people who wouldn’t have thought of it in their lives. They discover some tool and they go to book a VPS to try things out, after realizing that running something on a local machine isn’t as smart as running it on a server. People are getting more courageous because AI is helping them. And then I see so many hosting companies where you land on their website and there is no clarity. The design is not accessible. You don’t know where to look or what to choose. That too is part of accessibility. We have guidelines in accessibility, a lot of legislation. That’s the fear part, and I want to move away from that. But the legislation is built on something called WCAG, which are guidelines. People think if they follow all these guidelines, then they’re done. But if you only follow the guidelines and don’t look at it from a larger perspective, you’re again that restaurant with four-star prices, four-star meals, and plastic cutlery.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s really interesting because there are multiple layers to a hosting company. There’s the actual marketing website, so you go to xhost.com or whatever.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Mm-hmm.

Jesse: That’s the marketing website. Once they’ve completed checkout, you have the hosting panel. That’s where you manage your website and everything else. Then there’s WP admin, where you enter your content. Then there’s the customer’s front-end website that they’re actually building. The other day I posted on LinkedIn about an issue I had with Amazon, where it seems like they are promoting a ship date on the product view page that says, “It’ll be there tomorrow,” and then when you get to the last screen before you hit the button, the date changes to three days later. It almost feels like false advertising. But it brings me to accessibility. If you’re doing a really good job making your front-end marketing website accessible but you’re not doing it in the back end, isn’t that almost like false advertising? You’re setting people up thinking, “Oh, everything is working fine,” and then they get to the back end and it’s like a whole other team worked on it and nobody cared about accessibility. I’d want a refund at that point, and that’s going to cost the hosting company.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Exactly. And even if the back end is done right, you don’t know if it’s done right, because the one thing people forget to invest in is user testing. They’re prejudiced. They think, “These people are not my customer.” One of the things I love doing, and I’m a pretty expressive person, I do a lot of talks both on stage and in companies, and the first thing I do is tell the audience about all my own disabilities. Dyslexia, ADHD, ASD, on and on and on, and they think I’m really funny. At some point someone says, “But disabled people don’t visit my website.” And I say, “Well, you have a big disability, sir. You can’t listen. I am your potential customer, I can’t deal with your website, and I’ve got all these issues. And you just admitted to me that you can’t read the newspaper without glasses.” That’s the kind of conversation it takes. People need to be confronted.

Jesse: It’s really interesting because when we think about marketing analytics and whether a website is performing well, one of the things we look at is the bounce rate. But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bounce rate that differentiates between the person was just not interested in your content versus the person who couldn’t actually access your content. And I think that’s interesting because if you can’t put a number on the people who are bailing from your website because they can’t actually access it, then you end up saying, “No one with a disability is viewing my website,” when maybe it’s because they can’t physically view your site. You’d be missing that entirely.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Yeah, exactly. And there’s something… hold my water on this, because this was part of my talk in Krakow. I dove into a rabbit hole in an area I’m not comfortable with, which is SEO. I’d gotten some numbers from Semrush, who researched 10,000 websites together with accessibilitychecker.org, and the numbers were insane. 23% more organic keyword ranking, 19% more authority score. I quickly learned that to SEO professionals, these numbers raise eyebrows. So I started researching, and I found a lot of puzzle pieces. Google has always denied that they measure click behavior, but they were pulled into court in 2023 and had to admit they have a system called NavBoost. NavBoost tracks three things, simplified: good clicks, long last clicks, and bad clicks. A bad click is when you search, get this whole story from Gemini or Google’s AI overview, think “that’s what I want,” click the link, land on the site, see something you don’t like or didn’t expect, and hit the back button. Remember that two years ago people started screaming that their rankings were tanking? And now they’re tanking even more. The logic is we cannot measure the people who silently walk away, but the ones who jump off immediately, called a pogo stick, that is being measured by Google. It also came out in the 2024 leak. They couldn’t deny it anymore. And it’s logical. You don’t even need to have a disability. If you’re tired or just don’t like something, about 15% of people are like, “This is moving too much, all these animations, I’m out of here.” Or they can’t find where they need to be. And a lot of the nonsense in AI overviews happens because sites run client-side scripts and the LLM has to wait. Google can deal with JavaScript to a degree, but there are still going to be gaps because people didn’t create any semantic experience on the website. What does the LLM do? It fills in the rest with training material. So you get this nice AI overview, you think, “This is what I want,” you click through, and it’s not what you wanted at all. You hit back. And this happens even more on mobile than on desktop. Any SEO can come and fight me on this if they want to, but this is what is tanking rankings, and it comes back to accessibility again. I’m following wonderful people like Jono Alderson and Lily Ray who are also talking about this. Great GEO is great SEO, and great accessibility and semantic coding sit right on top of that. To circle back to the agency thing, if agencies are educated, their designers, their content creators, all of them, then accessibility is not an extra option. Selling a website that is not accessible is like selling a car without wheels.

Jesse: I like that analogy. And I like that you’re able to tie the need for accessibility to so much more than just the individuals who need it. It goes way beyond that. But we are at a moment where our producer is letting me know we need to wrap this episode. So we’re going to continue this conversation in the next episode.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Nice.

Jesse: Thank you so much for joining, and we’ll be back with more on accessibility. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you around the use of AI with accessibility, and I want to dive into that in part two.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Me too.

Jesse: So we’re at time, and we’re going to bring this back in part two, where I want to dive into accessibility and AI. I think it’ll be interesting to cover it from two angles: where AI can actually help us do more, and where I’m concerned that AI might be perpetuating the problem through all these site builders out there. Looking forward to diving into that with you.

Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Me too. Wonderful.

Jesse: Awesome.

Jesse Friedman: Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest, a thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, or a hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them at impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.