By Ralph Tkatchuk

The world of eCommerce is cut-throat, crowded, and competitive. You need to do all you can to win over more customers, and there’s only so far that you can slash your prices. Web accessibility in Canada and beyond is fast becoming an important advantage for eCommerce sellers who want to increase revenue and avoid costly lawsuits.

Consumers with disabilities make up a significant slice of your potential customers, with working-age people with disabilities possessing $490 billion in after-tax disposable income in the US, roughly the same as the African-American market. The disabled are also more likely to shop online, to avoid crowds that shove and push them aside, shop assistants who ignore them, and overwhelming lights and noise, but if your online store is one of the 98% that don’t meet WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements, you’re pushing them all away.

COVID-19 only sharpened the problem. Many elderly people had never bought anything online before the coronavirus arrived, but then they had to try to understand confusing online instructions, unclear purchase processes, and non-intuitive website hierarchies alone, because lockdown meant that no one could come round to assist them. Bear in mind that people aged over 65 are significantly more likely to have a disability than younger shoppers.

All we need to add is the fact that ADA title III accessibility lawsuits are rising against eCommerce sites and cost an average of $20,000 to settle out of court.

With so many good reasons to run an accessible store, what is holding online vendors back?

The enormity of the task (or so they believe).

Online sellers struggle to achieve full web accessibility.

Full web accessibility is easy to say but much harder to achieve. It demands that you make multiple changes to your source code so that you can:

Enable anyone who can’t use a mouse, for any reason, to navigate the entire site using only the keyboard, including popups and forms;
Simplify the language and the purchase journey so that shoppers with cognitive decline or cognitive difficulties can choose their products and complete their transactions;
Support the screen readers used by blind people to browse the internet, including coding links, icons, and buttons correctly;
Adapting the colour, size, spacing, font, and contrast ratio of the text, enlarging the cursor and clickable fields, and addressing other usability issues;
Stopping all animations and flashing gifs that could provoke a dangerous seizure in anyone with photo-sensitive epilepsy.

Most eCommerce vendors and site owners don’t have the tech know-how to carry out these changes, and/or are using a marketplace that doesn’t support full web accessibility. Accessibility service providers have the expertise to identify and correct accessibility issues but their services are expensive and can take weeks to complete.

It’s no wonder that vast numbers of online sellers are tempted by free accessibility plugins, but do they deliver on their promises? Unfortunately, the answer is No.

Free accessibility plugins are a mirage

Free and low-cost plugins like WP Accessibility and UserWay claim to fix accessibility issues on websites and online stores, but this is very far from the truth.

To begin with the positives, free accessibility plugins succeed in correcting most usability issues. They mostly generate an accessibility widget that allows the user to adjust the colour and contrast ratio; change the spacing and size of texts; and enlarge the cursor and the clickable field for buttons. Some of them can also adapt text alignment and fonts.

Although these are all useful adjustments that improve matters for visitors with low vision or colour-blindness, they don’t add up to full accessibility. Abut 80% of accessibility issues concern support for screen readers and keyboard navigability, so free plugins only fix 20% of your online store.

Keyboard navigation is crucial for millions of users who have amputated limbs, arthritis, motor disorders, or muscle weakness, and for able-bodied consumers with a broken arm or even a broken mouse. Although many plugins help support keyboard-only navigation, like creating a visible focus around web elements, none of them can cope with online forms, popups, dropdown menus, or clickable links and buttons.

That means that a visitor with disabilities may make it all the way to the payment page, but then be unable to complete a transaction because they can’t fill in the fields on your payment form without a mouse.

None of these free plugins support screen readers, either. One claims to provide alt tags, but that’s not enough. Another sidesteps the issue by providing its own screen reader, but it isn’t one that’s used by the majority of the blind community. There isn’t a single free plugin that delivers the role building, ARIA attributes, image alt tags, and navigational support that blind consumers need for their screen readers, effectively cutting them all off from your site.

On top of all that, you won’t find a free plugin that can simplify bewildering jargon or make sense out of confusing website structures to guide shoppers with cognitive impairments through your site. Nor do any of them stop animations and flashing gifs.

Free web accessibility plugins will cost online sellers a lot of money.

Web accessibility is fast becoming non-negotiable for eCommerce sellers, but the free plugins that promise to help them achieve it are nothing but a mirage.

The bottomline verdict is that plugins like Userway and WP Accessibility aren’t able to meet the many complex requirements for WCAG 2.0 accessibility compliance, leaving frustrated consumers to find a different store and online sellers vulnerable to accessibility lawsuits.

The solution? Use comprehensive web accessibility solutions like accessiBe or Level Access that actually deliver fully ADA complaint websites. True, they won’t be free, but your website will be accessible.

Ralph Tkatchuk is a freelance data security consultant and expert with over 9 years of field experience working with clients of various sizes and niches. He is all about helping companies and individuals safeguard their data against malicious online abuse and fraud. His current specialty is in eCommerce data protection and prevention. You can reach Ralph via Twitter (https://twitter.com/TkatchukRalph).

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