Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Retail Accessibility

If you ask someone about their week, you’re unlikely to hear a story about a retail experience — and that’s exactly how it should be. With some exceptions, we mostly want our shopping experiences to be as invisible as possible. Sometimes, it really is about the destination.

For many people with disabilities, online shopping can be far from seamless. When built without accessibility at the core, getting information and completing tasks on an app or website can become frustrating or even impossible. They face the same challenges on retail websites as everywhere else — things like poor color contrast, missing focus indicators, and lack of screen reader support — but also a few e-commerce-specific pain points.

Disability isn't an edge case or exception. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one in four Americans have a disability. This means that accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s also a way to grow your customer base significantly. Here are a few key ways to invite more people to engage equally with your brand.

Checkout Forms

I’ve never met anyone who was excited to fill out forms, but for people with certain physical and cognitive disabilities, forms can be frustrating, confusing or even physically painful to complete. To help everyone — but especially people with disabilities — complete forms quickly and painlessly, make sure form fields have robust support for autofill and digital wallets.

Product Photography and Video

Anyone who has bought furniture knows that sometimes your requirements can be maddeningly specific. The configuration of drawers in a dresser, the type of legs on a dining room table, or the interior dimensions of a bathroom vanity can make all the difference between a perfect fit and “not quite right.” This type of information can often be found in product photography, but many blind and low-vision users can’t access the contents of these images. While it’s not realistic to describe every aspect of a product, it’s important to be as thorough as possible.

Ensure images have detailed alternative text and that videos have transcripts with video descriptions for any on-screen content not covered by the talk track. Product videos also need high-quality closed captioning so shoppers who are deaf or hard of hearing can access them equally.

Video and Animation

Video is a helpful and engaging way to tell a brand story, especially for some people with disabilities that make it challenging to read a lot of text. Videos that play automatically, however, can be extremely distracting for people with attention-related disabilities. Avoid autoplay media — especially if it has sound — and always provide a visible pause button so people can easily stop the experience. The same goes for GIFs that loop through product color options or show a model in different poses. Remember that what’s attention-grabbing for one person may be focus-shattering for another.

Animation is a powerful tool for drawing shoppers' attention to the right place at the right time. Like any powerful tool, however, it requires discretion. A simple animation to show an item has been added to the cart can be part of a delightful experience. A sweeping, multilayer page transition or on-scroll animation can be disruptive or even cause some motion-sensitive users to feel physically ill.

Everything is for Everyone

Lastly, never make assumptions about the types of products people with disabilities will be interested in. Disability is not binary; it’s complicated, multifaceted and intersectional. People with disabilities use products in a wide variety of inventive ways. And, of course, many people of all abilities buy things for other people, not just for themselves. Whether selling groceries or performance sports cars, make sure to invest the necessary time to achieve full digital accessibility.

Russell Ahrens is a principal user experience designer for Nerdery, a Minneapolis-based premier digital product consultancy with depth of experience in strategy, design, technology and engineering, helping clients across a range of industries become fully digital.