What is the accessibility of your e-commerce and why is it important?

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What is the accessibility of your e-commerce and why is it important?

28/07/2021

Profile picture for user Maria Jose Guerrero

Maria Jose Guerrero

The accessibility of an e-commerce is its adaption to the necessities of any type of user, including the disabled or the elderly. Even though it may seem to be logical premise, there are actually many online e-commerce that are not accessible and don’t facilitate the purchase to people with any type of physical or cognitive disability. Because of this, from Minderest we explain to you why it is important to improve the accessibility of your e-commerce and how to carry it out. 

Among the motives to improve the accessibility of your e-commerce, in the first place one finds the importance of equal and just treatment to all potential clients. Beyond being an ethical business question, betting for accessibility will reinforce your brand image between all your consumers and can position you ahead of your competition. 

On the other hand, on a more strategic level, adapting the web to the necessities of all consumers will allow you to enlarge your target, improve your organic positioning, as Google rewards accessible sites, and offers a better shopping experience.  At the same time, a greater accessibility favors an increase in the conversion rate, by facilitating purchasing to any user. In the contrary case, those who encounter barriers at the time of navigating the page will abandon it without buying anything and without asking for help.

Users who are benefited by the accessibility of an e-commerce. 

To make your e-commerce more accessible, you should value, as a starting point, the necessities of four collectives: people with visual problems, people with hearing loss, people with psychological deficiencies or deterioration, and the elderly. 

In the case of those who suffer from vision or hearing problems, the first obstacle they will find is in graphic or audiovisual graphics. On the contrary, for people with some level of mental disability or the elderly it is more difficult to remember the characteristics of different products and understanding large and complex texts, with an elaborate lexicon or with an excessive volume of rhetorical figures.

Users who are benefited by the accessibility of an e-commerce

How to improve the accessibility of your e-commerce. 

In general, the web changes that favor accessibility are easy and are oriented towards improving the comprehension, interaction, and navigability. To start, you can make the following adjustments: 

  • Amplify the size of typographies and images. 
  • Employ typographies and colors the facilitate the reading. Avoid the colors red as it can cause problems for people with color blindness, another eye disorder to keep in mind. 
  • Adapt the website to screen reading software and label all product images explicitly.  
  • Insert the option of subtitles or audio descriptions in videos. From YouTube you can generate them automatically. 
  • Show the information gradually on the screen, don’t accumulate all the text and images in the beginning. 
  • Revise the product texts to contain simple and direct language. Do not write paragraphs of more than 4 lines and avoid excessively long phrases.  
  • Post simple forms. 
  • Eliminate time limits, like what usually occurs at check outs

You can allow apply these recommendations to your product pages in the marketplaces. In fact, these platforms facilitate a greater accessibility, because it will be easier to achieve these audiences within the marketplaces. Between them Amazon stands out, that employs easy words to classify and describe their products and offer the possibility of consulting its mobile version from the computer, with photos and texts of a greater size. At the same time it has adapted its devices to adjust itself to the necessities of all the users. An example of this is that you can ask Alexa to talk slower. Keeping in mind these tips, and with competitive prices, you will obtain an greater potential audience and generate a greater engagement with all of your users.

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