Last week, Accessibility.com hosted their AccessibilityPlus event, "Add to Cart: Creating an Accessible e-Commerce Experience." You can access the content on demand if you missed that event by clicking here.
With the exponential growth of digitization and mobile technology, more people are shopping online than ever before. To truly succeed in a competitive e-Commerce market environment, companies must make the online shopping experience more comfortable and accessible for everyone.
Here is a short guide on ensuring that businesses' online store is more accessible.
Shoppers with visual impairment
While creating an e-Commerce store design, website developers should take into account the needs of shoppers with visual impairments. They will likely use a screen reader to access the online store. To avoid browser compatibility with screen readers, site owners and managers should test their e-Commerce store design with the newest version of the browsers.
In many cases, a shopper with visual impairment may use a special browser, such as EMACSPEAK, MozBraille, or pwWebSpeak. These browsers are different from mainstream browsers and may not support all design features in modern e-Commerce portals. To meet this challenge, web designers can keep their online store platform as simple as possible with minimalistic features and make it less flashy or intricate in terms of graphics.
Differentiating between background and foreground may be difficult for a person with visual impairments that impact their ability to see items with low contrast. When selecting colors for the online store, developers should try to choose high-contrast color plans. Online tools, like WebAIM, can be used to determine which portions of the online store have low or high contrast.
Shoppers with color vision deficiency
Specific steps can be taken before development to create a more inclusive online shopping experience for people with color vision deficiency (color blindness).
Web designers can utilize the color wheel to ensure they choose colors from the opposite ends of the wheel for higher contrast. Colors which are opposite to each other are ideal for online stores because they can create a distinction between page elements and offer color harmony.
Shoppers with a color vision deficiency may also find it hard to access certain e-Commerce interactive elements, such as buttons. To overcome this issue, designers can add shapes, textures, and other cues like underlines to pages that have multiple interactive elements.
Shoppers with hearing impairment
People who are born with a hearing disability may find it hard to read text because of their reliance on sign language as their first language. E-commerce companies and retail stores with an online presence can create and upload sign-language videos for ]major parts of their online store.
This investment is worth it because more customers will be able to use the online store. The cost of creating these videos will be recovered over time. Smaller stores that do not want to undertake this investment may consider adding videos with captions and transcripts. Transcripts can be printed for reading offline.
Evaluate online store accessibility
Owners and site managers of an e-commerce platform perform a manual check to evaluate the accessibility of their online platform:
- Use the online store while being conscious of the limitations of some shoppers. Testing with a screen reader could be quite eye-opening.
- When browsing products and offerings in the store, look for buttons, images, icons, logos, and other elements that could appear confusing for someone with low vision. Identify tedious processes that are tedious to perform while using a keyboard and mouse.
- If the store is using media files, check whether persons with disability can access them. For instance, check whether accurate alternate texts have been provided to describe the product as appropriate to a shopper with visual impairment.
- Where videos are provided for product demos or product features, check whether accurate subtitles have been included for a user with hearing impairment.
Happy customers mean an increase in sales
Some e-Commerce businesses do exceptionally well because they focus on the goal of achieving customer delight each time a potential shopper visits their platform. By making online shopping easy and inclusive, e-Stores can win shopper loyalty and enjoy repeat business while positioning themselves as a responsible, customer-centric brand to stand out in a competitive online marketplace.
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