6 Effective Ways to Create an Accessible Ecommerce Site

Running e-commerce site is one of the effective ways to grow your business worldwide. As per the report of World Health Organization, around 15% of the world population lives in disabilities. The stairs in a mall could prevent disabled people from getting access. Similarly, the e-store owners need to create an accessible e-commerce site for everyone.

It is easy to create an e-store and opt for cheap woo-commerce hosting in order to get online presence. But when it comes to creating an accessible e-commerce site, many lack to maximize the user’s experience. This blog highlights top effective ways to make your site responsive & accessible.

1.   Make Sure the Site Is Keyboard Friendly

To create an accessible e-commerce site, it is essential to opt for the keyboard friendly navigation. With the advancement in technology, mouse is replaced and majority of devices rely on keyboard-navigations. You need to be sure that all of your site major features could be accessible via keyboard only. This helps you to maximize the user’s experience and make the site friendly to navigate.

To test whether your site is keyboard friendly or not, simply use your site without a mouse or on the mobile phone to experience your own site accessibility.

2.   Add ALT Text to Images

ALT text is one of the essential element on your site that helps the google web crawler to read the image. The ALT text also known as alt attributes also appears in the replacement of the image and let the users know about the image. The readers who view your website could easily get to know about the image even if it doesn’t appear. This is an ideal way to create an accessible e-commerce site.

3.   Choose Colour Theme Carefully

The colour theme is an important part of any web design. There are very few colours that could actually attract the human mind. To create an accessible e-commerce site, determine the colour contrast well to make users distinguish between various elements on a page.

4.   Accessible Links

The links added in many of the e-store sites aren’t defined. The users never get to know about what could happen after they link on a certain link. This needs to be updated as users may not be willing to open a certain link. Always tell your site visitors that what’s going to happen when they click a certain link. This will help you to create an accessible e-commerce site.

5.   Choose Easy to Read Fonts

Fonts can make a difference to your website. In many e-stores, the fonts used are either not attractive enough to gain attention of the users or not readable. You need to choose easy to read fonts in order to make your e-commerce site accessible.

6.   Avoid Automatic Media & Navigation

Since the days of Myspace, the automatic media files and navigations have been bane of internet. A user never likes automated media file started to run right after the page loads. This is one of the biggest issues in terms of website accessibility.  Users could simply get confused how to turn it off, and even it could be more difficult with a screen reader. To make accessible e-commerce site it is important to avoid automated media and navigations.