As an eCommerce store, your primary goal is to attract as many people to your store as possible, and keep them coming back for more. An important reason a lot of online stores spend hugely on including various features and functionalities to improve customer experience.
What most stores forget to consider, however, is the large number of potential visitors that are disabled. Most times, web accessibility takes the backseat or even totally forgotten about when eCommerce stores are optimized. However, an inaccessible store in this increasingly digitized world can affect the success of your store. Not only will it affect the number of visitors you attract and your site’s SERP performance, but you also risk a potential accessibility lawsuit.
The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) was passed more than 30 years ago in 1990. The Act solely applied to physical locations to provide disabled people easy access to different levels in their business location. In 2016, it began to include websites, and lawsuits have been on the rise since then. The business types mostly hit with these lawsuits were ecommerce, restaurants, and hotels. So your store can get sued if your website is not ADA-compliant. For online retailers, web accessibility is critical to ensuring the best experience for your customers, irrespective of their abilities. This means providing adaptations and features to your store that makes it easier for people with disabilities to perceive, navigate and interact as they please.
What to Expect Concerning Web Accessibility
The pandemic has no doubt accelerated a shift towards digital, where shopping online became a norm. A lot of people plan to do more online shopping even after the pandemic. Even though this should be great news for eCommerce stores, there is another side to this story. As more and more people go to online stores, lack of accessibility will be a major issue for those with disabilities. There are certain steps eCommerce websites follow to offer an accessible user experience to everyone and avoid lawsuits. We talk about four steps you can take to make sure your store is accessible. Here you go:
Provide Alternatives
Although the visual elements of your site are important, not everyone may be able to see or interact with them correctly. Use Alt text for your images and graphics. An alt-text is a short written description of an image, which explains the content of that image. Users who rely on screen readers and other assistive technologies need alt text to understand what images are about by hearing. If an image is decorative, however, the alt tag should be set to null so it’s not picked up by the screen reader.
Transcribing audio content on your site makes it easy for users with hearing impairments to interact with content. And beyond that, having multiple forms of the same content will help people with all forms of disabilities.
Make Content Easier to See or Hear
Content should be able to be resized, recolored, or read aloud to the user if need be.
Default colors should have a high enough contrast that people can see text and images as legibly as possible. Provide options for color changes for users that are colorblind.
Also, Zoom in and zoom out functions shouldn’t cause content to lose meaning. Users should be able to zoom in and out of your store without information being lost in the process. Users should easily pause, play, rewind, slow down, speed up or fast forward audio and video content.
Make Content and Instructions Easy to Understand and Follow
Use the simplest language possible when describing images, products, or giving directions. They should be as easy to understand as possible. Avoid technical jargon if most of your audience might not understand it. This helps people with cognitive disabilities.
Content should follow an understandable sequence because some visitors rely on a consistent user interface, and switching it up completely can throw some people and their adaptive software off. Keep it simple and predictable to increase accessibility.
Test Your Online Store With Accessibility Tools
A lot of useful free tools are available to test for ADA compliance and point out specific areas that can be improved on. Also, there are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) to help you precisely gauge how much content is accessible to disabled people on your eCommerce website.
Also, manually testing your site with a screen-reader and keyboard navigation is also an awesome idea. Schedule the tests periodically to make sure every parameter on your website works fine.
Bottom Line
So there you go! These are just some of the ways to go about providing an inclusive browsing experience on your eCommerce site. Web accessibility is definitely not for users with audiovisual disabilities - also includes people with different neurological, and cognitive disabilities.
Online stores that fail to strive towards accessibility risk running afoul of ADA compliance, which can lead to lawsuits. It's a good step as well to put out an accessibility statement.