E-commerce
E-commerce is explicitly named in the European Accessibility Act, and the checkout is where accessibility barriers stop a sale rather than merely annoying someone.
By Sergio Gualda Last reviewed:
Why e-commerce is different
Two things separate an online shop from most other sites.
The first is that the barriers land on a transaction. Elsewhere, a contrast failure makes something harder to read. In a checkout, a focus trap in the payment modal means the sale does not happen — and neither you nor the customer finds out why.
The second is that e-commerce is named in the legislation. The European Accessibility Act lists it explicitly among the covered services. Most sectors have to reason about whether they are in scope; online shops selling to consumers in the EU mostly do not.
Where audits actually find problems
Across the shops I have looked at, the findings concentrate in the same places.
The checkout carries the critical band. Form errors that are never announced, card fields that block paste, address fields without autocomplete, and a payment iframe that a keyboard cannot reach. Each one on its own is a fix of a few lines. Together they mean the journey cannot be completed without sight and a mouse.
Filters and sorting are usually custom, and usually broken. Faceted navigation is almost always a bespoke component. It updates results asynchronously, and it almost never announces that anything changed — so a screen reader user applies a filter and, as far as they can tell, nothing happened.
Variants are distinguished by colour alone. Colour swatches with no text alternative fail 1.4.1 outright, and they are the commonest “small” finding on a product page.
Product images do the selling and say nothing. The image showing the fabric texture, the size chart rendered as a JPEG, the ingredient list photographed on the back of the packet. Every one of those is information available only to people who can see it.
What to do first
- Audit the checkout end to end, by keyboard alone and then with a screen reader.
- Audit one product page and one listing page — they are templates, so one fix closes hundreds of URLs.
- Fix what stops completion before what degrades the experience.
- Re-test, because a fix nobody verified is a fix nobody has confirmed.
- Publish an accessibility statement that says what you found and what is still open.
Auditing templates rather than URLs is what makes this affordable. A shop with four thousand products has perhaps six templates.