Accessibility Audit for Local Retailer

Elevage Digital recently completed an accessibility audit for a local retailer that has a physical shop as well as an online retail presence using Shopify. 

The Challenge: Similar Businesses Being Sued

This retailer was part of an association of similar businesses that were all starting to be sued for having inaccessible websites.  They contacted Elevage Digital to conduct an accessibility audit to see if their online store met the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

The Solution:  Accessibility Audit and Recommendations

Elevage Digital conducted an audit of its global header and footer, homepage, contact form, content landing page, product category page, single product page, and whole cart and checkout flow.  Each aspect of these pages was reviewed for its conformance with WCAG 2.2AA level guidelines.  Pages and functionality were reviewed visually, with keyboards and with a screen reader. 

For each of the 87 WCAG 2.2 guidelines, Elevage Digital noted areas where the guidelines were supported, partially supported, or not supported.  Some guidelines were marked as Not Applicable because they did not apply to this particular website.  Since we were testing against the AA level of the guidelines, items that are only required for level AAA were marked as Not Evaluated. 

The Result:  Partially Supported Accessibility and Remediation

The results of the audit showed that the website partially supported WCAG 2.2 AA guidelines.  Many of the issues we found are common across most of the internet.  They include:

• Insufficient color contrast
• Missing form labels
• Missing focus indicators
• Inability to use the keyboard to interact with carousels and popups
• Incorrect order of HTML headings
• Missing alt text for images

Many of the issues were caused by how the business created their content and the colors they chose.  In some cases, they used poorly coded GemPages elements.  In general, the shopping cart and checkout pages worked fairly well, although there were some Shopify-specific issues. 

Elevage Digital worked with the business and its web developer to remediate as many of the issues as possible and to add an accessibility statement to its website with information on who users can contact if they experience an issue.