Champion ecommerce accessibility and avoid the fine

Everyone should have the right to access your website

Organisations are doing themselves a disservice if they haven’t added ecommerce accessibility features. It’s about giving everyone access to the same information, regardless of the disabilities users may have.

“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect” – Tim Berners-Lee

Organisations should be proactive and devote resources to improve the accessibility of their websites. It’s also, literally the law. 

That’s not the only reason to have an accessible site, building an accessible site benefits everyone: 

• It has a direct correlation with improving SEO, because of the semantic HTML. Making your site more findable on search engines. 
• It demonstrates good morals and shows that your progressing towards making e-commerce better. 
• Being more accessible means more people can use your ecommerce site which means more traffic and more sales. 
• And again, you won’t be at risk of getting sued. 

Is your ecommerce store digitally accessible? 

In 2020 there was a significant lack of compliant web accessibility in the retail sector. Almost 2,000 retailers were sued for not having an accessible website. Throughout the UK businesses are required to provide equal access to users with disabilities.

In this post we’ll explain: 

• The basics: What is web accessibility? 
• Is anyone doing it right? 
• Quick wins that have massive impact

The basics: What is ecommerce accessibility? 

Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. This includes those with impaired vision, motor difficulties, cognitive impairments or learning disabilities and deafness or impaired hearing. 

At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, imparment or disability. Many more have a temporary disability. 

The Web Content Accesibility Guidelines (aka WCAG 2.1) 

This is a legal requirement for all businesses that covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible. These regulations require UK website owners to achieve specific accessibility standards. 

Everyone should have become compliant with this law by September 2020. If they haven’t, they may be subject to legal action. 

You can access the guidelines here. 

Is anyone doing it right? 

At the start of this year we analysed some of the top 250 retailers homepages and found that as many as 6 in 10 retailers are still neglecting basic accessibility needs. 

The common issues we found were no alt text on images, colour vs text contrast and having text in images. 

Beyond the obvious moral responsibility, it’s in the retailers best interest to make their site accessible to all. So it’s time for them to get a move on. 

How to make your ecommerce store more accessible

Add images with alt text: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but visual elements like images are a barrier to blind users. 

Be descriptive with your CTAs: Click here. Click here. Click here. Click where? Click on forget password. Click on privacy policy. 

Keep contrast sensitivity in mind: It’s common sense not to have black text on a black background. And you wouldn’t have highlighter green on highlighter yellow – so just think about the visual contrast of text on the background. 

Using the colour white, whilst having a picture of clouds is an example of doing it wrong. The text ‘Membership’ is literally lost in the clouds and so is some of the other text. You want to make it as easy as possible for someone to read your banners.

Apple has a very clear website and has kept a white background with black text to make it as easy as possible for everyone to read the text. A work well done.  

Keyboard navigation: You should be able to access anything without the mouse by clicking tab. We’ve seen some cases when the user can’t get out of the cart, don’t let that be your website.  

Champion ecommerce accessibility 

Having an accessible Magento store is not a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. Otherwise you open your business up to a lot of headaches and risks. 

Accessible websites need to be built according to specific guidelines. At GENE we help our clients build and remediate their Magento ecommerce websites to ensure they are compliant and accessible to all. Speak to us today to find out more.