E-Commerce Accessibility

The degree to which online shopping experiences — product discovery, evaluation, checkout, fulfilment, customer support, and (on peer-to-peer platforms) selling — are usable by people with disabilities, particularly blind and low-vision (BLV) users who depend on screen readers, voice control, or sighted assistance. E-commerce accessibility is a persistent problem area: 2025 audits by Contentsquare and WebAIM reported 84% of checkout pages functionally invisible to screen readers and 95% of home pages failing WCAG. The European Accessibility Act extends legal accessibility requirements to e-commerce services from June 2025. Research distinguishes between compliance (code-level WCAG conformance) and decision confidence (whether users can actually judge product suitability and complete transactions independently); the two do not reliably correlate.