What is the real cost of inaccessible e-commerce? The role of accessibility in forward-thinking businesses.

Kasia Lorek

May 28, 2024

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Imagine that you had an accident and broke your right arm. Being right-handed, you now have to learn how to do your daily activities with only your left arm. You switch to an electric toothbrush to make teeth cleaning easier and remove the fingerprints from your right hand required to unlock your phone. Then, you try to open your favorite website. Navigating with a mouse using your left hand isn’t convenient, so you decide to use a keyboard instead. However, the website displays a modal that can’t be closed with a keyboard (you need to click outside the modal to close it), forcing you to use a mouse. Then, you spend 5 minutes entering an email and password, as there’s no autocomplete feature, and your password includes characters that require some keyboard shortcuts - not an easy task when one hand is disabled. In the end, for some reason, you can't submit the form by pressing enter, and you can't focus on the “Login” button with the keyboard. The website was forcing you to use the mouse again, leading you to close it instead of wasting more time.

The growing need for accessible websites

According to WHO, 16% of the world’s population experience significant disability. It is over 1 billion people, a number that will continue to grow due to increasing lifespans. This includes the various disabilities - physical, sensory, cognitive, and intellectual impairments. This number includes people with lifetime disabilities as well as those with temporary disabilities, such as people affected by some accidents or illnesses, who recover over time.
The Purple Pound report reveals even more eye-opening statistics from the UK market, highlighting what e-commerce is missing due to inaccessible solutions. In the UK alone, 4 million people abandoned retail websites due to accessibility barriers, costing businesses £17.1 billion in 2019. In 2023, the global spending power of disabled households was estimated at ﹩13 trillion, growing by 14% annually, yet only 10% of businesses have a targeted strategy for this market. Additionally, accessibility helps create a positive brand image and enhances SEO results.

Accessibility laws and your business

The Americans with Disabilities Act, the EU Web Accessibility Directive, or Canada’s AODA are examples of laws that were created to enforce accessibility improvements in many areas, including website creation. While these regulations primarily affect public sector websites, they’re expanding to the private sector. Due to the European Accessibility Act, which took effect in 2019, all European websites must meet European accessibility standards by June 28, 2025. It’s clear to assume that the future of web development lies in creating inclusive websites for everyone, regardless of ability. That’s a good reason to start prioritizing accessibility today.

What does an accessible website mean?

Many people without disabilities probably never used assistive technology when browsing the Internet and may be not aware of the accessibility features on websites. Accessible websites contain content that can be accessed by any person - including the one who needs a screen reader or cannot hear the sound effects on the website. These websites should be navigable with both a mouse and a keyboard. Any interactive element should be intuitive - users should know what happens when they interact with the interface, so all components should be properly described. Additionally, all forms on the website should provide help with filling them and correcting the issues with the provided data. Users should be able to easily locate key features such as navigation, repeated sections of the pages, or search - without the need to look for them on each page. Distracting elements or parts of the page unavailable for people should be easily disabled - this includes animations, flashing effects, videos, and short timeouts.

Implementing WCAG guidelines for success

Taking into account that there are multiple different regulations and areas to cover, having a set of standards or guidelines is essential when working on accessibility. Currently, the Web Content Accessibility Guideline is the widely accepted standard referenced by the laws mentioned earlier. WCAG contains a list of success criteria grouped into 4 sections that cover four principles of web accessibility:

Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. This principle focuses on making the content of the website visible to all users, even if they can’t use all their senses. Implementing features that assist people with low vision, screen reader users or people who need more time to interact with the content will make websites meet the success criteria for this principle.‍
Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable. This means users should be able to navigate the website with a mouse or keyboard and have enough time to perform actions.‍
Understandable - Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable. To follow this principle, the website should have easy-to-understand interfaces and content or provide help for users who need assistance (eg. explaining complicated terminology, describing the results of actions)‍
Robust - Content must be robust enough to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. This principle ensures that the website can be accessed by various browsers and assistive technologies, both current and future ones.

Additionally, each success criterion is categorized into one of 3 conformance levels - A (lowest), AA (mid-range) and AAA (highest). Usually, the AA level is referenced by the regulations as the one that should be implemented. It means that the websites need to comply with all A and AA guidelines.

Here you can find the most actual list of all WCAG success criteria together with proposed techniques and examples of failures during implementing them - https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/.

Accessibility is becoming increasingly important - both from the business and human perspective. Creating accessible websites will help your business grow and will make the web a more inclusive place for everyone. There’s a huge chance that one day each of us may need assistance using the website, so implementing the WCAG guidelines today is a step we can take to benefit our future selves.

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