Expanding your market share is always a good thing. That’s why digital accessibility should be on the minds of every online retail business. Digital accessibility means making your website easy and usable for persons with disabilities to read, navigate or make purchases. Many people with disabilities rely on user-side assistive technologies, but if your site’s content isn’t built with this in mind, shopping will be difficult or impossible for them.
For example, many websites require the use of a mouse, but persons with Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or other fine motor limitations must instead rely on keyboard navigation. If websites aren’t coded for navigation by keyboard — for example having links, fields or buttons in logical tab order with a visual focus indicator — these users will likely leave in frustration.
There are many design techniques for making sites more accessible to a range of assistive technologies such as screen readers or screen magnifiers. Aside from being the right thing to do and avoiding legal action, the business benefits are significant: the global market of persons with disabilities is one billion strong, with spending power of more than $6 trillion. As retailers look to maximize market share, let’s review what should be included in an accessibility audit and the logistics and characteristics of a good audit report.
What to Include in an Audit
Retailers must consider the accessibility of their entire online presence — including desktop sites, mobile sites, native apps, videos, documents and emails. As a company’s front door, many ecommerce businesses should probably start by focusing on the desktop web, especially their home page.
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The scope of an audit must include the browsers you wish to test, and with which assistive technologies. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of potential combinations.
Economically speaking, the best approach is to focus your tests on the most common usage scenarios — for example, a Windows PC running the NVDA screen reader (often used by persons with visual disabilities) and Chrome browser. Using this as the primary test platform, we’ve seen organizations catch more than 90% of problems. A good accessibility partner will be willing and able to test any combination of OS, assistive technology or browser you can imagine, but cost and ROI need to be considered.
An audit’s scope also needs to specify which pages to test. You may be tempted to test every page to get a full picture of where your organization stands. However, for online retailers the most strategic items to test in a first audit are your site’s key entry points, core paths, highest traffic pages and most critical flows, like adding an item to a shopping cart, applying a discount and checking out.
The scope of an audit must also define which standard to test against. This may depend on your industry; however, the most common and widely accepted standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, also known as WCAG. Created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), WCAG defines the technical guidelines for creating accessible web-based content and serves as the basis for accessibility requirements worldwide. The current version, WCAG 2.1, was released in June 2018. An updated version, WCAG 2.2, may be published as soon as fall 2021.
WCAG Success Criteria are broken down into different levels: A (basic conformance), AA (intermediate conformance), and AAA (advanced conformance). The current accepted standard for compliance is both WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA.
Level A, the lowest level of conformance, primarily focuses on barriers for people with blindness, deafness or motor disabilities. Level AA adds additional barriers for low vision and a bit of help for people with cognitive disabilities. If you don’t have specific accessibility guidelines for your organization but want to avoid legal risk, WCAG 2.1 A and AA compliance is a reasonable standard to adopt.
Logistics of an Audit
If a digital accessibility program is a new charge for your organization, having an accessibility expert or partner perform your audit may be the best approach. This is particularly true if you’re conducting the audit due to a lawsuit, when time is of the essence. When choosing an accessibility partner, always ask about staff certifications, level of expertise and recent audit results from similar organizations.
There are proven methodologies for measuring digital accessibility that require both manual and automated testing. There have been great advances in automated testing; the latest research shows automation can catch almost 60% of issues. However, this isn’t good enough to reach full compliance, and it’s critical to also use human testers to examine websites and ensure they are a good experience for all shoppers. For retailers choosing to conduct portions of an audit themselves to save on cost, there are tools available that non-experts in digital accessibility can use to test for accessibility issues on their websites.
In this process, don’t be swayed by short-cut solutions like accessibility overlays or widgets. These tools attempt to create an entirely separate experience, avoiding the core issues and, at times, making the experience much worse. Many have written about the legal implications of heading down this path.
Characteristics of a Good Audit Report
A good audit report needs to be timely. If you’re reacting to a lawsuit, you’ll need your results as quickly as possible. Most proactive audits take two to three weeks. A good audit report should also feature an easily understandable format — an executive summary dashboard (highlighting top issue types and their categories, to aid in prioritization), impact on people with disabilities and how to fix the results.
Highlighting the impact on people with disabilities is important because not all accessibility issues are created equal. For example, the report can show the impact on a five-point scale of severity — blocker, critical, serious, moderate or minor. This description can help organizations triage issues when they’re performing remediation. For the most critical issues, the audit should provide recommendations for fixing the issue through code examples.
You’ll know you have a good audit if your executives understand the organization’s high-level state of accessibility, the impact on persons with disabilities and suggested next steps for resolving the highest priority issues. On a more tactical level, your developers will have a comprehensive understanding of the accessibility issues they have, and guidance on resolving those issues. This also includes a validation process to ensure they’ve truly been fixed.
Conclusion
The research referenced on 2020 digital lawsuits found retailers were involved in more than three of four cases. There are several reasons retailers are targeted — they are popular web destinations and easy to visit; their apps are easy and convenient to download; and existing U.S. Department of Justice settlements have set precedents that retailers must provide accessibility.
A good number of these retailers had invested in quick-fix overlays which, as we’ve noted, aren’t sufficient to protect against legal action. The options for ensuring digital accessibility are expanding, and it’s important to know what approaches are reliable and credible. Accessibility initiatives comprising a comprehensive audit and logistics with fast and precise reporting might seem like a challenging proposition, but they don’t have to be. In many cases such an approach is the most cost-effective when it comes to avoiding lawsuits and expanding market reach.
Glenda Sims is the Director of Accessibility Services at Deque, where she shares her expertise and passion for the open web with government organizations, educational institutions, and companies ranging from small businesses to the Fortune 50. Sims is an advisor and co-founder of AccessU and served as the lead judge for AIR (Accessibility Internet Rally). She spent over a decade as a senior developer at the University of Texas at Austin, where she helped support the university’s central website and worked as an accessibility expert and web standards evangelist along with her mentor and hero, Dr. John Slatin. Sims co-authored the white paper “A11Y Wars: The Accessibility Interpretation Problem” with the amazing Wilco Fiers. She is an active member of the IAAP Global Leadership Council and gives back to the web by volunteering at the W3C on the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.
