Why Ecommerce Accessibility Is Uniquely Challenging
Ecommerce websites face a specific accessibility problem that static content sites don't: they're never finished. Products are constantly being added, promotions updated, pages redesigned, and new functionality launched. Every change is a potential opportunity to introduce a new accessibility issue.
The complexity of modern ecommerce interfaces compounds this. Complex filtering systems, dynamic cart interactions, multi-step checkout flows, modal dialogs, image carousels—each of these requires careful accessibility implementation. Poor contrast ratios, missing image alt text, and absence of keyboard navigation support (the hardest category to detect) are among the most common failure patterns.
The legal exposure is real. ADA-based web accessibility lawsuits have increased significantly year over year, and ecommerce is one of the most heavily targeted sectors. Courts have consistently found that websites of businesses open to the public are subject to ADA requirements. Accessibility isn't just an ethical obligation—it's active legal risk management.
Common Ecommerce Accessibility Issues
- Poor color contrast: Text that doesn't meet WCAG 4.5:1 contrast ratio requirements against its background
- Missing alt text: Product images, promotional banners, and icon buttons without descriptive alternative text
- Keyboard navigation failures: Interactive elements (dropdowns, modals, carousels, cart) that can't be operated without a mouse
- Form labeling issues: Input fields without proper associated labels—common in checkout and account creation flows
- Focus management problems: Modal dialogs that don't trap focus correctly, or that don't return focus to the trigger element on close
- Dynamic content not announced: Cart updates, error messages, and loading states not communicated to screen readers via ARIA live regions
- Non-accessible custom components: Custom-built dropdowns, date pickers, and filters that don't follow ARIA widget patterns
The Three-Phase Compliance Approach
The most reliable path to WCAG compliance combines automated and manual testing with ongoing monitoring—not as a one-time project, but as a continuous process. We recommend a structured three-phase approach:
Automated Scanning and Issue Identification
Automated accessibility testing tools scan your entire site and identify issues that can be detected programmatically—typically catching 30–40% of all WCAG violations. This phase establishes your baseline and prioritizes the most common and impactful issues across your site.
Professional audit tools like accessibleweb.com, adasitecompliance.com, and Usablenet Assistive provide automated scanning with detailed reporting on violation categories, affected pages, and recommended remediation. These tools go significantly beyond browser extensions or free checkers—they scan authenticated pages (like logged-in account areas and multi-step checkout), provide structured reports suitable for your development team, and enable ongoing tracking of compliance status over time.
At the end of Phase 1, you have a complete inventory of issues, organized by severity and volume, with clear remediation guidance for your development team.
Expert Manual Audit and Remediation
Automated tools can't catch everything. Keyboard navigation failures, screen reader interaction problems, focus management issues, and logical content structure problems require a human tester—ideally one who actually uses assistive technology—to identify. Manual testing typically uncovers 60–70% of total WCAG violations that automated tools miss.
Manual testing covers:
- Complete keyboard-only navigation through all critical flows (product discovery, cart, checkout, account management)
- Screen reader testing with NVDA/JAWS on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS/iOS
- Zoom and text resize behavior up to 200% and 400%
- Color contrast verification beyond automated checks
- Form error handling and validation messaging
- Dynamic content behavior (AJAX updates, modals, notifications)
Remediation in this phase happens at the source—fixing code, templates, and content rather than applying surface-level workarounds.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
A one-time audit doesn't maintain compliance. Ecommerce sites change constantly—new products, seasonal campaigns, theme updates, app installations, content changes. Each change introduces potential regression. Ongoing monitoring catches new issues as they're introduced rather than discovering them after a complaint or lawsuit.
Ongoing monitoring includes:
- Scheduled automated scans (weekly or triggered by deployment)
- Alerting when new violations exceed defined thresholds
- Periodic manual re-audits of high-traffic and high-risk pages
- Accessibility review incorporated into your QA process for new feature launches
- Documented compliance status for legal defensibility
The goal of Phase 3 is to shift accessibility from a remediation project to an ongoing operational standard—integrated into how your team ships changes, not bolted on afterward.
A Note on Overlay Solutions
Accessibility overlays—JavaScript plugins that claim to automatically fix accessibility issues on your site—have faced significant and well-documented pushback from the accessibility community. The Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by hundreds of accessibility professionals and advocates, documents how these solutions often cause as many problems as they solve and have been actively harmful to some users with disabilities. Several overlay vendors have also faced their own ADA lawsuits. We strongly recommend researching this topic thoroughly before implementing any overlay solution—the landscape is evolving and the legal defensibility of overlay-only approaches remains questionable.
The right approach is fixing accessibility issues at the source—in your code, your content, and your development process—rather than applying a client-side layer that attempts to patch problems after the fact.
The Business Case for Accessibility
Beyond legal compliance, accessibility directly affects your bottom line. Approximately 26% of US adults live with some form of disability. Accessibility improvements—better keyboard navigation, clearer contrast, proper form labels—also improve the experience for users on mobile devices, users in bright sunlight, users with slow connections, and older users. The overlap between accessibility best practices and general UX best practices is substantial.
Accessible sites also tend to perform better in search—semantic HTML, proper heading structure, and descriptive alt text are things Google's crawlers value for the same reasons screen readers do.
Investing in accessibility isn't just about risk reduction. It's about serving more customers better, reducing support burden, and building a more resilient technical foundation.