*The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People* Jonathan Zong, Frank Elavsky / May 20, 2026 The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site <https://svelte.dev/docs> addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: “If you’re an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format. Beep boop.” Svelte is participating in a broader movement to make the web legible and navigable to AI systems. The specific convention it adopted, llms.txt <https://llmstxt.org/>, is just one piece of this effort. From Model Context Protocol <https://modelcontextprotocol.io/> (MCP) servers that give AI agents structured access to tools and services, to Vercel’s proposal to include LLM instructions in HTML <https://vercel.com/blog/a-proposal-for-inline-llm-instructions-in-html>, the trend is clear. The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user. What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. Yet, the framing on Svelte’s site sends an unfortunate message. When the audience is AI, accommodation is offered with a wink. Beep boop! But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/> (WCAG) have required semantic, machine-readable HTML for decades. Yet, a 2026 study of the top million webpages <https://webaim.org/projects/million/> found accessibility flaws in over 95% of sites. The overlap between what AI agents need and what screen reader users need, however, is narrower than it appears. Screen reader users require not only plaintext, but also structure: heading hierarchies that allow jumping between sections, landmark regions, descriptive link text, and alt text for images. WCAG requires semantic HTML because screen reader users navigate content sequentially and depend on structural cues to find specific information. [...] cont: https://www.techpolicy.press/the-web-is-being-made-accessible-for-ai-not-peo...