Accessibility gets less attention in Framer migration conversations than performance or SEO, but it matters for real users and increasingly for legal compliance — worth understanding what actually changes when you export.
What's mostly unaffected by export
Semantic structure — proper heading hierarchy, meaningful alt text on images, logical reading order — is largely determined by how the site was originally built in Framer's editor, not by the export process. If your Framer site has accessibility gaps today (missing alt text, skipped heading levels, poor color contrast), a straightforward export carries those same gaps forward unchanged. Export tooling generally isn't in the business of rewriting your content structure.
What export can genuinely improve
Reduced motion respect. A thoughtful export can add support for prefers-reduced-motion, disabling or simplifying animations for users who've set that OS-level preference — something worth checking whether your original Framer site or its export handles at all, since it's easy to miss either way.
Keyboard navigation on rebuilt interactions. If a mobile menu or other interactive element gets rebuilt from scratch during export (common for elements Framer's runtime built dynamically that a static export needs to reconstruct), that's a chance to make sure the rebuilt version is genuinely keyboard-navigable and has correct ARIA attributes — or a risk of making it worse, if the reconstruction only handles mouse/touch interaction and forgets keyboard entirely.
Removing runtime overhead can indirectly help — a faster, less JavaScript-heavy page is generally easier for assistive technology to process reliably, especially on lower-end devices.
What can go wrong during export if you're not careful
A poorly-implemented custom mobile menu reconstruction (see our post on Framer mobile menus after export) that only wires up click events and ignores keyboard/focus management would be a real accessibility regression versus Framer's own (imperfect, but existing) implementation.
A practical post-export accessibility check
- Tab through your entire site using only the keyboard — can you reach and activate every interactive element, including any rebuilt menu?
- Run an automated scanner (axe DevTools, Lighthouse's Accessibility audit) on the exported site and compare the score against the original Framer-hosted version.
- Verify
prefers-reduced-motionis respected if your site has meaningful animation.
Accessibility isn't automatically better or worse after a Framer export — it inherits your original site's baseline, plus whatever the export process specifically touches. Worth a deliberate check rather than an assumption either way.