If you are the owner of an online storefront in Canada, you should get familiar with Screen Reader software and start listening to your website. In August 2022, the Retail Council of Canada published the Accessibility Amid a Changing Retail Landscape Guidebook to provide Canadian retailers with quick tips on how to interact with customers with disabilities. Out of its 28 pages, 18 emphasize in-person interactions, and only five pages are about online interactions, mostly WCAG references.
Making online stores accessible has become a trend in Canada. The Government of Ontario is targeting the creation of an accessible province by 2025 through the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). Other provinces are following along and the Federal Government has also started moving toward federal regulation by creating technical committees. The consequences of non-compliance for the Web Accessibility part are still unknown, but if we look at how it’s going in the US with the ADA, there are some reasons for concern.
I will not get into details about WCAG (the technical standard) because it’s where people stop reading and start stressing. Rather I will try to convey what the expectation is for an accessible online storefront. In my experience as a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility, I recommend starting with making Screen Readers work well on storefronts, instead of starting with colour contrast and font size.
There is a layer on every User Interface (UI) that “speaks” to the user, literally. If it doesn’t, then something is wrong. In this context: silence is bad. If you test your storefront with a Screen Reader and don’t hear anything, or the vocalization doesn’t match the part of the page you are on, most likely your storefront is not accessible, therefore not compliant.
Web Accessibility is hard to implement because it’s hard to empathize with what the User Experience (UX) should “look like” for people with disabilities. In my experience, once it’s understood that we must aim instead for what it should “sounds like”, then we will be closer to fixing the problem from the ground up. Think of it as a person telling you over the phone what they are doing while shopping at a supermarket. This “listening experience” should match the user’s interactions.
Nowadays, most people know what wheelchair ramps are for in supermarkets. Most shoppers, handicapped or not, find it useful to push that big button to automatically open the doors. Audio jacks have been available in ATMs for over 20 years. All the previous allow consumers with disabilities to exercise their full shopping potential in the physical world. It doesn’t have to be any different for online shopping.
Also, there isn’t any lack of examples of what an accessible UX sounds like, we just need to know where to look. For instance, if we keep in mind that Government Organizations should be compliant with Web Accessibility as well, my first reaction would be to take a look at how “Retail by Government” is being implemented, so the online storefront of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) would be my first stop in finding out.
I’m not saying you should follow LCBO’s UX “by the numbers”, but listening to its vocalization while browsing it with a Screen Reader, will give you a better idea of what the goal is.
If you manage to make your online storefront vocalize accurately, the rest of the accessibility bugs are discoverable with automated testing and fixes are easy. Yes, you still need developers and accessibility experts, and no, widgets and overlays will not provide compliance.
The most popular SRs are NVDA (Windows), VoiceOver (Mac and iPhone) and TalkBack (Android). Here’s a brief demonstration of what a Screen Reader interaction sounds like on an iPhone.
