AI-generated content has an accessibility problem. Most tools produce markup that looks fine visually but fails screen readers, keyboard navigation, and automated WCAG audits. Gallop takes a different approach: accessibility is enforced at generation time, not bolted on afterward.
The Problem with Post-Hoc Accessibility
The typical workflow for AI-generated pages goes: generate, publish, audit, fix. You run Lighthouse or axe, find 15 violations, and manually patch them. But this only catches the issues that automated tools can detect, about 30% of WCAG criteria. The remaining 70% require human judgment: is the heading hierarchy logical? Does the alt text actually describe the image? Is the tab order intuitive?
By the time you've fixed everything, you've spent almost as long as building the page manually. The AI saved no time. It just shifted the work from creation to remediation.
Accessibility isn't a post-launch checklist. It's a structural property of the markup. If the structure is wrong, no amount of patching fixes it.
Schema-Level Enforcement
Gallop's content schema encodes accessibility requirements as hard constraints. The AI literally cannot produce invalid markup because the schema doesn't allow it:
Heading hierarchy
The schema enforces that heading levels follow proper nesting. You won't get an h4 following an h1 with no h2 or h3 in between. The Architect agent understands section hierarchy and assigns heading levels that match the document outline.
Required alt text
Every image block in the schema has a required alt attribute. The Writer agent generates descriptive alt text based on the image's context in the page, not generic labels like "image" or "photo." If an image is decorative, the alt text is explicitly set to an empty string, which is the correct WCAG pattern.
Semantic HTML
The schema only allows semantic elements. There are no generic div-based layouts. Navigation sections use nav. The main content area uses main. Lists use ul/ol with li children. This isn't a style preference. Screen readers use these semantic landmarks to help users navigate the page.
Link and button text
No "click here" links. The Writer agent generates link text that describes the destination. Buttons have clear action labels. The schema rejects empty link text or identical link text pointing to different URLs on the same page.
Color Contrast
Stride CSS is designed so that every color combination meets WCAG AA contrast ratios. The Stylist agent selects from pre-validated class combinations. It can't place light text on a light background because that class combination doesn't exist in the preset system.
This is where oklch pays off. Because oklch lightness is perceptually linear, we can mathematically verify contrast ratios at the design system level rather than checking every individual element.
Keyboard Navigation
Interactive elements (buttons, links, form inputs) receive proper focus styles from Stride CSS. The tab order follows the document flow because the markup is semantically structured. No tabindex hacks. No JavaScript-dependent focus management. The browser's native keyboard navigation just works because the HTML is correct.
Validation Pipeline
Even with schema-level enforcement, Gallop runs an accessibility audit as the final step in the generation pipeline. It checks:
- Heading hierarchy completeness
- Alt text presence and quality (not just existence, but semantic relevance)
- Color contrast ratios for all text/background combinations
- Interactive element labeling
- ARIA landmark region coverage
Pages that fail any check are regenerated with corrective context. In practice, the schema constraints eliminate 98% of accessibility issues at generation time.
Accessible by Default
Every Gallop page ships WCAG AA compliant. No post-launch fixes required.
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