eCommerce Blog

There are literally hundreds of things to think about when launching or overhauling an eCommerce site. You’ll be faced with such decisions as which hosting provider is right for you, what graphical elements will best showcase your products or services, and how to handle inventory control and fulfillment. One vital element that often gets lost in the shuffle is site accessibility.

Many site owners stick web accessibility on a back burner for future consideration—and we all know what that usually means. While it may seem like a secondary concern, the opposite is true. Customers can be won or lost depending on how hard your site works to help people with visual disabilities, learning challenges, and speech disorders, as well as the elderly and infirm, to navigate and use your site.

For special-needs customers, such as those with a visual or hearing impairment, offering your web content in audio, video, and text formats allows them to digest the same information in the format that’s easiest for them.

Why Focus on Accessibility?

By making the effort to design an accessible website that’s easy for users with disabilities to navigate, you instantly gain a competitive edge over online businesses that choose to overlook accessibility. A little extra work now can go a long way toward increasing long-term customer retention—not only for the disabled and the elderly, but for all shoppers.

Who Has Special Web Accessibility Needs?

It’s pretty clear what needs to be done to make a building accessible: add a ramp or an elevator for those who aren’t able to walk up stairs, install automatic doors, and make sure doorways are wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. When it comes to web accessibility, however, the requirements are a little more complicated.

When tweaking your design to make your website accessible, you’ll have to take into account the varied needs and limitations of several groups of people that use your site in different ways:

• Blind Users: Most users with visual impairments navigate the web with the aid of a screen reader, a program that reads the information on a website aloud or presents it in Braille or another format. These users will often have trouble with images, charts, or acronyms unless they are carefully annotated. It’s possible to code information for blind users into a site’s HTML code in a format that can be read by screen readers.
• Color Blindness: People with color blindness, one of the most common visual disabilities for men, have trouble telling colors apart. The most common form of color blindness makes it impossible to distinguish between red and green. If your site uses these colors to highlight fonts or discounted prices, you should replicate this information in text form using a clear color contrast.
• Deaf Users: Hearing-impaired shoppers may seem to have the easiest time surfing the web, but this isn’t always the case. Many websites place crucial information in video or audio formats that can’t be processed by the deaf or hearing-impaired. Written transcripts of all audio materials should be included to ensure accessibility for these users.
• Manual Problems: Those suffering from Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, quadriplegia, or repetitive strain injuries may not be able to use the same keyboard as other users, and often can’t use a mouse at all. Accessible websites employ alternate navigation methods by allowing users to select links with the Tab key or other options.
• Age-related Vision Problems: Many elderly web users find it difficult to read small fonts or to navigate sites that require them to click on small objects or hyperlinks. Sites with large or adjustable fonts, clear contrasts, and style sheets that allow shoppers to control the display of information ensure an easy shopping experience for people with partial or age-related visual impairment.
• Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities: Users who have dyslexia, autism, Down’s syndrome, or other learning disabilities can usually use the web fairly easily, but may find heavy text challenging.

Other Accessibility Considerations

A secondary challenge when designing an accessible website is making sure it runs the same way for all users, regardless of the computer or browser they’re using. To make your site equally accessible to all web users, test to make sure that it loads quickly on even slow connection speeds. If yours takes 30 seconds or longer to load, users are likely to grow impatient and look for a site that is more readily available.

It’s also a good idea to use low-tech designs that avoid dependence on Java and other special scripting options. While these specialty coding languages can create some nice effects, they can also slow down your page loads and cause problems for people with certain browsers and software.

Whatever approach you take with your website’s design, considering accessibility needs early in the planning process will help ensure that your site doesn’t discriminate against users with special needs.  A standard practice to ensure that your site is built with accessibility in mind is to follow the practices published in the Section 508 guidelines.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under eCommerce Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.