How to lose a customer in 10 seconds
Plus lose their friends and family as well
In the modern digital age, where so much of our lives revolve around online platforms, ensuring accessibility for everyone is critical. However, widespread issues prevent more than 90 % of assistive technology users from having an equal online experience.
In the context of online retail, when these fundamental accessibility barriers exist, 91 % of customers who need these features will take their business to a competitor that IS accessible.
In online interactions where competitors don’t exist (think voting, government interaction, healthcare, transportation, banking), people with disabilities are forced to spend time and money attempting to perform the interaction in a way that doesn’t hit the online accessibility barrier. These workarounds may involve spending hours on the phone, getting assistance from friends and family, or physically traveling to an office to deal with a human. This additional effort to get around accessibility barriers is commonly called a #DisabilityTax.
It is essential to understand that REAL harm has occurred in either of those conditions. Experiencing this barrier may cause people with disabilities to file state or federal complaints or even litigation. In the case of online retail, you have lost that business, and they will complain to others through social media, informing others of their poor experience. The number of individuals seeing the complaints may range from a few family members to tens of thousands of other disabled people on large Facebook groups.
Below, I review fourteen common problems that are relatively easy to detect that trigger a person with a disability to find somewhere else to take their business.
1. Use of Accessibility Overlays
An accessibility overlay is a software solution that attempts to automate web accessibility improvements without altering the underlying code of a website.
The Problem: While accessibility overlays may seem like a quick fix, they often fail to address underlying accessibility issues and can even introduce new problems.
Why It Matters: Relying on overlays rather than implementing genuine, robust solutions can result in a superficial level of accessibility, potentially excluding many users. New customers with disabilities may have already had bad experiences with other overlays and leave when they see the icon indicating the site owner has chosen to use an overlay.
Time to action: It takes less than a second for a user to detect this problem and decide to leave.
2. Use of Inaccessible Cookie Banners, Privacy Notices, or Advertising
The Problem: These notices and banners are often not designed with accessibility. These components are often the first thing a user interacts with on the website.
Why It Matters: Vital information regarding privacy and consent should be easily accessible, ensuring informed decisions and respectful user experiences. When cookie banners, privacy notices, or advertising are inaccessible, the first component the user interacts with makes it impossible for users to use the underlying. This is called a “keyboard trap” and is one of the most severe WCAG violations.
Time to action: I’ve been told by screenreader users that it takes them about fifteen seconds to give up on workarounds to keyboard traps when they are the initial component of a website.
3. Lack of an Accessibility Statement
The Problem: Without a clear statement, users are unaware of a site's accessibility features or how to report issues. Accessibility is never accidental. The lack of an accessibility statement has an extremely high correlation with the site being extremely inaccessible.
Why It Matters: An accessibility statement provides transparency and trust, indicating a commitment to inclusive design. It indicates that accessibility has been considered and usually identifies an email that can be used to contact users if they encounter accessibility problems.
Time to action: Load a page, press <Control-F>, and type the word accessibility. If nothing is found, the site probably doesn’t have an accessibility statement. Three seconds, tops.
4. Absence of Skip Links or Focus Indicators
The Problem: Without skip links and focus indicators, navigating a website can be tedious and confusing, especially for assistive technology users.
Why It Matters: Efficient and intuitive navigation enhances everyone’s user experience.
Time to action: Load a page and press the tab key. The first thing that should come up is a skip link. Press the tab again, and the focus should move. A focus indicator should be present every time the tab or shift-tab button is pressed. This activity can be accomplished in five seconds.
5. Lack of Keyboard Access
The Problem: When sites aren't navigable by keyboard alone, they exclude those who can't use a mouse. That includes screen reader users or people with disabilities related to their hands, such as paralysis, arthritis, and carpal tunnel syndrome.
Why It Matters: Offering diverse ways to interact ensures everyone can use a platform comfortably.
Time to action: Lack of keyboard access is frequently detected when testing for skip links and keyboard focus indicators, so no additional time is required to detect this.
6. Poor Color Choices
The Problem: Low contrast colors or color schemes that don't consider color blindness can make content unreadable for many. Low contrast particularly impacts older individuals and people with vision loss; color blindness affects over 4 % of the general population.
Why It Matters: Ensuring readability and clarity is fundamental for all users to comprehend and interact with content effectively.
Time to action: It doesn’t take long for individuals impacted by bad color choices to decide the website is problematic and look for alternatives.
7. Magnification Issues
The Problem: Reflow occurs when webpage components automatically enlarge and shift their layout when the screen is magnified. Legitimate reflow does this without requiring horizontal scrolling. Content that needs to be reflowed or images that become blurry when magnified correctly pose challenges for those who rely on zoom functions. There are five times as many individuals who use magnification as who use screen readers, so this is about 1.5 % of the general audience.
Why It Matters: Everyone should be able to view content at their preferred size without sacrificing clarity or functionality.
Time to action: <Control>+ a couple of times and then look at images, layout, and scrollbars. Another “three seconds, tops” operation.
8. Lack of Quality Multimedia Accessibility
The Problem: Videos without captions or described audio exclude deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals and those with visual impairments. However, captions, in particular, are used by vastly more non-disabled individuals than people with hearing loss. 80 % of caption users are English Language Learners, people in noisy environments, or people who are more visual than auditory learners.
Why It Matters: Multimedia content should be accessible, ensuring no one misses out on information or entertainment.
Time to action: Once a video is located, it takes 2 seconds to determine whether it has accessible alternatives.
9. No Descriptions for Informational Images
The Problem: Screen reader users require text equivalents (alt-text) to images that contain information not elsewhere. Screen readers can only convey the information presented in images with alt-text. If the alt-text is missing from informative images, this is not an equivalent experience. Alt-text is one of the most straightforward, understandable, and basic accessibility guidelines to implement. If a website lacks alt-text, chances are the rest of the website will be largely inaccessible.
Why It Matters: Visual content should be understandable to all, regardless of their ability to see it.
Time to action: Very short, most modern web pages are very image-heavy and will only take a handful of seconds for a screen reader user to determine whether.
11. Ambiguous links and buttons
The Problem: What does someone who can’t see do with a link that says “click here” or “learn more?” HTML does not associate links with the text next to them. What do the same individuals do with a table with multiple lines and an edit button? If designers insist on using vague or repetitive language, developers must use ARIA to disambiguate the language conveyed through a screen reader. Examples of unambiguous links and button language include “Edit Row 1, Student Sheri Byrne-Haber” or “Click here for more information about training solutions.”
Why It Matters: We are again back to equivalent experience. Sighted individuals can make inferences by identifying the proximity of webpage text with links and buttons. People who are legally blind cannot make these inferences.
Time to action: 30 seconds, maximum.
12. Bad Header Structure
The Problem: Header structure not being used at all, header language not supporting navigation, or invalid use of the header hierarchy are three types of poor header structure a user can run into on a webpage.
Why It Matters: People with reading disabilities use header structure to quickly jump to the part of the page they are interested in.
Time to action: 30 seconds, maximum.
13. Not Being Dyslexia Friendly
The Problem: Use of italics, center or right justification, crammed line and word spacing, and multi-column layout can make reading difficult for those with dyslexia. Between 5 and 40 % of a website’s audience will have learning differences like dyslexia, depending on the audience.
Why It Matters: Every user deserves a reading experience that doesn't strain or frustrate them.
Time to action: This might take a few minutes, but certainly at most 10. Dyslexic users have multiple tools they can try using to work around issues caused by website content.
14. No Announcements of Status Changes
The Problem: When status changes (like a completed download or submitted form) aren't announced, users relying on screen readers might be excluded from essential information. Also, website actions that trigger *multiple* changes must have each change announced. An example is deleting something from a shopping cart that changes the subtotal, removes a coupon, and increases the remaining amount to get free delivery.
Why It Matters: Equivalent experience is what accessibility is all about. Failing to provide screen reader users access to every modification on a webpage is necessary to provide an equivalent experience.
Time to action: It may take some time for the screen reader user to discover this situation because of the lack of information. However, once it is discovered, screen reader users will not trust the accessibility of the remainder of the website.
Conclusion
If you are committing any of the 14 accessibility sins identified above:
You are hanging a lawsuit target around your organization’s neck;
You are undermining any claims of inclusion that your company may be publicly making, and;
You are driving away disabled customers and potentially many additional people who hear about their struggles.
Understanding and addressing accessibility barriers is more than just ticking boxes on a rigid checklist. Addressing accessibility barriers is about ensuring inclusivity and fairness in the digital realm. As creators and developers, it's our responsibility to ensure the corners of the online world that we control do not intentionally or unintentionally discriminate against people with disabilities by excluding them.
Great summary Sheri. 💕