Web Accessibility: Lawsuits, Revenue & Usability
Web accessibility has been a hot topic in ecommerce this year, with the Department of Justice taking a stance that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to most retail websites. This has led filings of ADA-related lawsuits growing to over 11,000 cases per year.
The Department of Justice has published a statement that: “the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by [retail stores and other sales or retail establishments], including those offered on the web.”
However, the threat of a lawsuit under the ADA isn’t the best reason to build an accessible ecommerce website. There’s two much more compelling reasons - first, there’s over 51 million adults in the United States with a disability. Meeting their needs on your website is good for business. Second - accessibility benefits us all, in both philosophical and direct ways. Most directly - accommodations to improve accessibility quickly become features that benefit more than just their initial target audience. Features that improve contrast, for instance, can be used by individuals in bright settings (shopping on the beach, anyone?).
What is an accessible ecommerce website?
An accessible ecommerce website has features that make it usable by as many people as possible, regardless of their particular abilities or disabilities. Disabilities can be temporary (a broken arm) or permanent (blindness), and can be congenital (born without arms) or acquired (losing arms in an accident). Accessibility features take many different forms, but some features include:
Alt text on images and other visuals, so that users who are blind can understand them via screen
Make sure that button and link text is unique and descriptive to provide context
Provide a unique title for each page or view
Ensure that forms can be completed and submitted using just the keyboard
Use color, font size, and other visuals to improve contrast and legibility for users with low vision
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are put forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to improve accessibility for users with disabilities. The guidelines are meant to help web developers design websites that can be used by as many people as possible, regardless of their particular abilities or disabilities. As of late 2022, the current version of the WCAG is WCAG 2.1, with versions 2.2 and 3 currently in draft.
The WCAG marks each guideline with one of three levels - Level A for essential items that must be provided, Level AA for items that would be ideally supported and Level AAA for specialized support for specific audiences. Most laws and lawsuits have focused on Level A and Level AA items, so many groups recommend building compliance with Level A and Level AA guidelines into all of your digital projects.
The A11Y Project
One of the leading voices in web accessibility is the A11Y Project, a community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier. By curating courses, videos and other content, the A11Y Project website provides a great starting point in your journey to better understand accessibility for ecommerce businesses. They provide an accessibility checklist built on top of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with additional information to help you understand the guidelines and better apply them to your work.
The A11Y Project also helps users avoid potentially misleading promises from commercial providers of accessibility services - for instance, they point out that there’s no such thing as “perfect accessibility” or a “100% accessible website” and that you should be careful in working with companies that make promises along those lines. They also curate a list of well respected professional accessibility services.
Ensuring Your New New Ecommerce Site is Accessible
When building a new ecommerce site, we recommend starting with the A11Y Project’s accessibility checklist. Begin the conversation around accessibility in the earliest stages possible - when selecting a platform and an implementation partner and when scoping and designing the project to implement your new site. Make it clear to all involved, not just developers or designers, that following the accessibility checklist is a priority.
Make sure that as features are being designed, developed and tested everyone involved is aware of the need to meet the items on the A11Y checklist. Make a quick check of at least Level A guidelines part of your quality assurance (QA) or user acceptance testing (UAT) processes.
Updating an Existing Ecommerce Site for Web Accessibility
The best place to start when updating an existing ecommerce site for web accessibility is to audit your site against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Two ways to do this are by using the accessibility checklist provided by A11Y, or by working through the Testing Accessibility workshop sponsored by A11Y.
As you work through the WCAG, use the levels provided on each guideline to prioritize any improvements you need to make to bring your current site in line with the guidelines, focusing first on all Level A items, then Level AA items. Within the Level A items, look for items that you can resolve once that will impact as much of your website as possible. For instance, if there is a technical change needed to your theme to meet the guidelines that will apply to all pages, or an item in your header or footer that appears on all pages, complete those items first.
Ensuring New Ecommerce Features are Accessible
Building a website in an accessible manner, or even auditing to improve your existing website is accessible isn’t enough. Ecommerce websites evolve over time - new features are added, new technologies are implemented. Many sites start out with good intentions and launch highly accessible but then lose accessibility over time. Typically this is because web accessibility isn’t part of your team’s culture or processes. Incorporating a check for compliance with the Level A guidelines in your QA or UAT process before launching new features can help greatly, followed by periodic reviews of your site to catch any Level AA items that might have snuck through. This is something you can do yourself or hire an agency or specialist in web accessibility. Even if you are completing this work in-house, a periodic review by a third party can help make sure you didn’t miss anything.
Supporting Web Accessibility in Ecommerce
We need everyone’s support for an accessible web. Please support web accessibility - this can be done directly by sponsoring or contributing to the A11Y Project, or indirectly but just as importantly by talking about web accessibility with your colleagues. Make accessibility a question you ask potential vendors, a topic of discussion at industry events and help us bring more attention to the value of building accessibility into the ecommerce industry.
The Future of Ecommerce Accessibility
AR, VR, the metaverse and other technologies in the future of ecommerce will bring new challenges for accessibility. For instance - these technologies are inherently vision-based and accommodations have not been designed yet for individuals with poor or no vision. New categories of accessibility may appear as well - for instance, some individuals can be highly prone to motion sickness and many VR experiences provoke this. This is why involvement in things like the A11Y Project are so important - we all need to work together to set best practices for accessibility as these new technologies are applied to ecommerce.
Need Help with Ecommerce Web Accessibility?
If you have an existing ecommerce website and would like someone to review it for potential accessibility improvements, or if you’re building a new website and want to work with a team that incorporates accessibility from the ground-up, schedule a free consult with the Creatuity team to learn more about how we can help. And for more helpful ecommerce content like this, subscribe to Creatuity’s weekly commerce newsletter.
