Making eCommerce Accessible to All: A Conversation with Bet Hannon

In today’s eCommerce landscape, accessibility is no longer optional — it’s essential. As online shopping continues to dominate retail, ensuring that eCommerce platforms are accessible to everyone isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s good business practice and increasingly, a legal requirement.

To dive deeper into this important topic, we spoke with Bet Hannon from AccessiCart, an expert in digital accessibility with extensive experience helping businesses create inclusive online experiences. Bet brings a unique perspective that moves beyond mere technical compliance to focus on the human experience at the heart of accessible design.

In this insightful Q&A, Bet shares practical advice for businesses at any stage of their accessibility journey — from simple, high-impact changes that can be implemented immediately to strategies for future-proofing your eCommerce site. She also addresses the business benefits of accessibility, including increased conversions, broader market reach, and protection from potential legal issues.

Whether you’re just beginning to explore digital accessibility or looking to enhance your existing efforts, this conversation offers valuable insights that can help make your online store more inclusive, compliant, and ultimately, more profitable.

Q: Accessibility is often approached from a compliance and technical standpoint, sometimes overlooking the human element. How do you suggest site owners shift their mindset to prioritize the human experience?

BH: I think it’s really important for site owners to learn at least a little about how people with disabilities actually use websites. This is such a mystery for a lot of people, and that leads them to jump right to the compliance of technical standards.

This is a little comparable to thinking about making sure their websites are mobile responsive. We don’t necessarily jump immediately to all the technical standards, we think first, “some users will be on a small screen, and they will need to have this functionality modified just a little to make a better experience for them.”

Once a site owner knows a little bit about how people with disabilities are going to use the site – they understand and prioritize making that a better experience.

For instance, screen reader users often ask the screen reader to read out loud all of the H2s on page, and then when they find a section that they’re interested in, they ask the screen reader to read all of the H3s, and so on with H4s. What they’re doing is scanning the content, just like a user without visual disabilities would do. But if you don’t have your H-tags semantically nested and ordered in the page or product, that makes their scanning more difficult.

Similarly, screen reader users often will ask the reader to read out loud all the link text on a page – another common content surfing strategy. But if the link text is all just repeated “click here” or “read more”, you’ve prevented that user from surfing your content.

One more example: users who depend on screen readers AND users who can’t use a mouse (perhaps due to a mobility impairment) rely on keyboard navigation. This requires not just functional keyboard controls (like being able to close popup modals), but also visible focus indicators (typically an outline box) as elements are activated, and focus that moves through the page in a logical order (for instance, ensuring the email signup doesn’t come AFTER all the footer links).

Q: Beyond compliance, accessibility can remove barriers that might otherwise prevent users from completing a purchase. Can you share specific examples or data points where businesses have seen increased conversions due to accessibility enhancements?

BH: In the last year, we saw a startup gender-neutral apparel brand – which clearly has being inclusive as part of its brand! – where fabric patterns/color choices were not able to be accessed via keyboard navigation. This meant that users that depend on keyboard navigation could never get site products into their cart! They’ve now fixed this.

One of the really common areas to find accessibility issues in is eCommerce checkout, and more often than you might think, problems with keyboard navigation that prevent actual purchases.

I really advise eComm site owners to start by checking the entire buyer journey for issues: search & filtering; choosing variations & options; getting products in the cart and checking out. And actually, start at the end of the process and work your way backward to the beginning. That way you don’t have a user waste their precious time getting nearly to the end and then hitting a roadblock. Imagine how much more frustrating that would be!

Q: For businesses that are just starting their accessibility journey, what are some simple, high-impact changes they can implement right away? Are there any low-cost or no-cost solutions that can quickly enhance usability and drive better engagement?

BH: There are four really simple accessibility issues that don’t require a lot of technical skills and most site owners can start to fix themselves. This makes them a great place to start an eCommerce accessibility journey. These issues are:

• Color contrast. Use one of the many free online checkers to get all the color combinations to meet contrast guidelines. If your target audience is over 50 years old, start with this.
• Alt text on images. Adding alt text is usually done in the CMS. Remember that alt text for product images focuses on the product, not necessarily describing the action of the image.
• Heading structures properly nested
• Remove ambiguous link next OR add special hidden screen reader text, which can be done with a plugin.

Q: Video is a major part of modern eCommerce, from product demos to customer reviews. How does making this content accessible through captions and transcripts benefit not just users with hearing impairments but also search engine rankings and engagement? Are there best practices for implementing these improvements?

BH: Research shows that 80% of the users who watch videos on social media with the sound off and captions on are not hearing impaired. They are in a situation (like a public space or a noisy environment) where they can’t listen out loud and may not have earbuds with them. We think that this also applies to product videos too.

Additionally, for some users the language of the video may not be their first or most familiar language. For all kinds of viewers, having captions can help increase comprehension. I started turning on captions years ago for my favorite British crime dramas because I wasn’t always catching everything with rapid accents and idioms.

Providing a transcript in addition to captions on the video can provide an SEO benefit, but also allows users to search through them as well. This can be especially important if you have videos with a lot of technical content or how-to information.

A couple of best practice tips:

It’s become a trend to only show 2-4 words of captions at a time, and/or to highlight words as they are spoken. This is exhausting visually for people with hearing impairments, so I would avoid doing this. What this does in practice is reduce the amount of time that viewers can look at the video part of the content because you’ve slowed them down to only a few words at a time and they have to keep their eyes on the words. Use one or two lines of text, and don’t highlight words.

Most platforms like YouTube or Vimeo will auto-generate captions for you. Which is huge, because then you aren’t paying a professional by the minute to caption for you. But be sure you take the time to read through the auto-generated captions and correct them.

There’s a reason people with hearing impairments call them “auto-craptions”. There can be not just funny errors, but seriously embarrassing ones. Bonus points if you add in descriptions of sounds or music that are important to the video.

Q: You have highlighted that accessibility isn’t just about current users with disabilities but also about future-proofing for aging populations and ourselves. How do you communicate this long-term benefit effectively to businesses that may see accessibility as a short-term cost?

BH: If we are lucky enough not to die suddenly, almost all of us will develop some sort of disability. Disabilities increase as we age, and of course the average age in most developing nations is rising. If nothing else, site owners should think about what kind of experience they would like their future self to have. Or their parents or spouse. Would you like for them or your future self to still be able to use websites and buy things on eCommerce while maintaining independence and human dignity?

Additionally, for most businesses it is more cost-effective to retain current customers than it is to acquire new ones. This means that improving your accessibility can retain customers as they start developing disabilities with age.

The pandemic certainly got a lot of people more used to doing things online that they hadn’t before, like ordering groceries and all kinds of other things. As people who have had more comfort with technology and eCommerce are aging and developing disabilities, they will expect to have those experiences accommodated and expect digital accessibility. The commerce sites that put this in place early will have a competitive advantage.

Q: Beyond ethical and business benefits, what are the potential legal consequences of ignoring accessibility? Can you explain the types of lawsuits and complaints that businesses might face, and how they can proactively protect themselves?

BH: Digital accessibility is the law in most developed nations. It doesn’t always get enforced evenly, but it is the law in the US, the EU, the UK, Canada, and many other places. Most of these laws center around human rights legislation and making sure that everyone has equal access to use and benefit from websites and other digital content.

In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act will go into enforcement June 28, 2025. This is a broad collection of legislation that impacts everything from smart phones and check-in kiosks, to e-book readers and websites. eCommerce websites must meet WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, unless they have less than €2 million in annual revenue or less than 10 employees. This applies to all eCommerce websites who have EU customers – even if the business is based in another country like the US.

Each nation of the EU has transposed EAA under their own national laws so the process can vary a little, but generally a complaint is filed with the national oversight agency. That agency may give you a limited timeframe to make your website meet guidelines, but ultimately fines can be levied. Most fines start around €60,000, but in Italy it can be up to 5% of your gross global annual revenue, and in Ireland the company CEO can even get jail time!

In the US, website accessibility is driven by serial plaintiff lawsuits under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) that are largely focused on driving financial settlements. It’s generally cheaper to settle these lawsuits than to fight them, and the typical lawsuit may cost $20,000-$30,000 or more. Companies do get sued more than once. Always a part of the settlement requirement is that the website conform to WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, typically within 12 to 24 months.

What we typically see is site owners who delay dealing with accessibility until they are sued or have a complaint filed against them. Maybe they are hoping to avoid the expense, or sometimes they just did not understand that they had this compliance requirement. Either way, waiting until there is some enforcement action is the most costly way to deal with accessibility – not only because you have these extra legal and settlement fees, but because the work to make your website accessible must now be done on a compressed timeline, and as the site owner you lost all control over that.

The start of a good defense is to recognize that no site is ever 100% accessible to 100% of people with disabilities. And that any time something changes on the website – whether that’s content changes as new products are added or plugin updates – there’s an opportunity for new accessibility issues to be created.

The best defense then, is to realize that accessibility needs to be an ongoing aspect of site ownership that needs regular attention. Just like with site security or SEO, start with the basics (like those beginning issues we mentioned above), then put in place a regular program of testing and remediation. For most sites, this should probably be monthly.

Make sure this is documented, and shows that you are regularly finding issues and fixing them. This will not prevent you from getting sued or having a complaint filed (because nobody can promise that kind of immunity), but it does become evidence of an ongoing good faith effort that may at least help put you in a better negotiating position, and you will be ready to quickly address any issues that someone complains about.

Q: Have you encountered compelling stories of how accessibility changes the shopping experience for individuals with disabilities? How do these stories help drive the message home for business owners?

BH: People with disabilities usually have to ask for help a lot. They often depend on friends and family members several times each week for help with things online that a lot of others would find “simple”, like ordering a product or paying for a service. That can impact things like their sense of independence and human dignity.

Imagine then, that a person with a disability comes to your commerce site, and finds a shopping experience with little or no barriers. You’ve not just sold them a product or service, you’ve given them a sense of independence too. Because of that, they are more likely to become a repeat customer, and even share with others they know an enthusiasm for your brand. It seems to me that accessibility is an opportunity for a win-win all around.