ACCESSIBLE E-COMMERCE: Five Online Shopping Problems Encountered by People with Disabilities

Pencil Drawing of Shopping Cart

In the article Tips For Online Shopping With Disabilities: A Website Accessibility Guide, you’ll discover some of the common online shopping problems experienced by people with disabilities.

These include:

  • Rarely can you see what clothing looks like on people sitting down. There’s the website, but what about the products themselves? For people who use wheelchairs, it can be hard to tell if clothing they see online would be comfortable or flattering in a wheelchair
  • Detailed, homogeneous descriptions can be difficult to find on some sites. According to surveys, only 49% of disabled people feel they have even some of the information needed or wanted while making purchasing decisions
  • Flash animations can be bad for both visually impaired and learning-disabled users, creating over-stimulation. Sometimes, there’s not much to be done for ads, but sites themselves can be overstimulating, too.
  • Subtitles and closed captions are a small thing to add to videos but sometimes ignored. Be sure to turn on closed captions on YouTube, as most websites use YouTube to host their videos.
  • Plain links called “links” or “click here” are not helpful to those who use screen readers. Luckily, labeling a link with the text “click here” is falling out of fashion

Read the rest of Tips For Online Shopping With Disabilities: A Website Accessibility Guide

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WCAG 2.1: 312 checkpoints covering A, AA and AAA W3 accessibility guidelines
Section 508: 15 US federal guidelines covered by 59 accessibility checkpoints

Find out more about Mary Gillen’s Accessibility Testing & Remediation Services: Websites, PDFs, Office Docs & Videos

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