Key takeaways
- Online stores are the most frequent target of accessibility lawsuits. UsableNet’s 2025 report found ecommerce accounted for 70% of the 5,114 digital accessibility lawsuits it tracked.
- Inaccessible stores lose sales. In the UK Click-Away Pound 2019 survey, 69% of disabled internet users with access needs said they leave a website that is difficult to use, an estimated £17.1 billion in lost UK spending.
- The highest-risk parts of a store are product images, filters, variant selectors, the cart, checkout and popups.
- Design and test to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with keyboard and screen reader checks on every step from search to order confirmation.
- Third-party apps, reviews widgets and payment tools are part of your store’s accessibility. Vet them before you install them.
Ecommerce websites face accessibility problems that content sites do not. Product photos carry information shoppers need, filters and variant pickers are often custom-built, and checkout depends on forms that must work for everyone. When any step fails for a keyboard or screen reader user, the sale is lost. This Emulent guide covers what an accessible store needs, how to test it, how to fix it and how the work supports conversions and SEO. It is general guidance, not legal advice.
What does an accessible online store need?
An accessible store lets every shopper find products, understand them, choose options and pay without help. The baseline is WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
| Requirement | What it means |
|---|---|
| Product image alt text | describe what a shopper needs to know, such as color, material, pattern and standout details. “Navy linen button-down shirt with chest pocket” beats “product image 1.” |
| Product details in text | size charts, specifications and ingredients as real text, not images. |
| Accessible variant selectors | size and color options that work by keyboard, announce their names and show which option is selected and which are sold out in text, not color alone. |
| Usable filters and sorting | filter checkboxes with labels, and results updates announced to screen readers. |
| Labeled icon buttons | search, cart, wishlist, quantity plus and minus and close buttons all need accessible names. |
| Cart updates announced | “Added to cart” and quantity changes are spoken without moving focus. |
| Manageable popups | email signup and discount modals that can be closed with Escape, trap focus only while open and return focus afterward. |
| Color contrast | at least 4.5:1 for text, including sale prices, badges and fine print. |
How do you make checkout accessible?
Checkout is where accessibility and revenue meet most directly. Every field, button and error message has to work for keyboard and screen reader users.
- Visible, programmatic labels on every field, with autocomplete attributes for name, email, address and card details.
- Errors described in text next to the field and summarized at the top, with focus moved to the summary after a failed submission.
- Guest checkout available, and account creation offered after purchase instead of before.
- Shipping, tax and fees shown in text before the final step.
- Payment options, including wallets, reachable and operable by keyboard.
- Session timeouts that warn users and let them extend time.
- An order confirmation announced clearly, with the order number in text.
Shorter checkouts help everyone. Baymard Institute found the average checkout in 2024 had 11.3 form fields, while most sites need only 8, and its research puts average cart abandonment at about 70%.
How do you test an ecommerce site for accessibility?
Test the full path a customer takes, from landing page to order confirmation, instead of stopping at the home page.
- Automated scans: run WAVE, axe DevTools or Google Lighthouse on the home page, a category page, a product page, cart and each checkout step.
- Keyboard pass: find a product, apply a filter, pick a size and color, add to cart, change quantity and complete checkout with only the keyboard.
- Screen reader pass: repeat the same path with NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac and iPhone and TalkBack on Android.
- Mobile check: zoom to 200%, test tap target sizes and confirm nothing important is hidden behind sticky bars.
- App inventory: list every installed app and widget, including reviews, chat, upsells, loyalty and buy-now-pay-later tools, and test each one.
Expect issues. The 2026 WebAIM Million report detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of top home pages, with low contrast, missing alt text and missing form labels most common.
What should you fix first, and how does it pay off?
Fix anything that blocks a purchase first: an add-to-cart button keyboard users cannot reach, a variant picker screen readers cannot operate or a checkout field with no label. Then fix shared templates such as the header, product card and product page, so one repair carries across the catalog. Add alt text standards to your product upload process and publish an accessibility statement with a way for shoppers to report problems.
Skip overlay widgets; UsableNet counted more than 1,400 lawsuits in 2025 against companies that had them installed. The real fixes also support SEO: descriptive product alt text helps image search, real headings help search engines and AI shopping answers understand your pages, and text-based specifications are easier to index than images. For ecommerce builds, we recommend Shopify, where checkout accessibility is largely handled by the platform and your theme, product content and apps need the same care. Results vary by store, catalog and audience.
How the Emulent team can help
Emulent audits online stores across the full shopping path, combining automated scans with keyboard and screen reader testing on product pages, filters, cart and checkout. Our website design team fixes the issues in your theme, product templates and apps, and builds alt text and accessibility checks into your merchandising workflow. To make your website easier for every customer to buy from, contact the Emulent team.