profile

davedavies.dev

Should more traffic equal fewer accessibility issues?

Published about 11 hours agoย โ€ขย 1 min read

Hi Reader ๐Ÿ‘‹

It's been really interesting reading everyone's responses to the SOEA 2026 report. One thing which surprised many people is this question:

Should more traffic mean a more accessible product page?

You might expect the busiest stores to be in better shape. After all, they have the most to lose.

The State of Ecommerce Accessibility 2026 groups stores by traffic ranking. Here's the share of product pages in each group with at least one critical accessibility issue:

  • Ranked 500,000โ€“1 million: 63%
  • Ranked 100,000โ€“500,000: 65%
  • Top 100,000: 69%

So it turns out that the busier the store, the more likely its product page had a critical issue. Wild.

What does that mean for your store?

Every customer who lands on your product page meets every issue on it. So the more traffic you get, the more customers each issue can turn away.

What's your next step?

Treat accessibility like conversion rate and page speed: something you check every time the page changes. Next time your best-selling product page changes, check it again and see if your result has moved.

Talk soon,
Dave

600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246
โ€‹Unsubscribe ยท Preferencesโ€‹

davedavies.dev

Actionable tips to remove the hidden accessibility barriers currently stopping your customers from completing their purchase. Join the top 6% - watch your sales grow, and your brand reputation shines.

Read more from davedavies.dev
Built with Kit

Hi Reader ๐Ÿ‘‹ Exciting week - The State of Ecommerce Accessibility 2026 is out. What is the State of Ecommerce Accessibility report? Over the summer I scanned 59,400 Shopify and WooCommerce product pages, one per store, all from stores ranked among the world's top million websites. The headline stat is this: 64% of product pages had at least one critical accessibility issue. Overall, 96% failed at least one automated accessibility check. And if you've been reading my newsletters for a while,...

8 days agoย โ€ขย 1 min read

Hi again ๐Ÿ‘‹ If a customer clicks "Add to basket" on your best-selling product without choosing a size and nothing is added, what happens next? Perhaps the size selector turns red, or an error message appears on the page. The problem is that neither of these guarantees that your customer knows what went wrong. Questions to ask yourself: Is colour the only clue that something went wrong? A customer with colour blindness may miss that change and not realise anything needs their attention. My...

13 days agoย โ€ขย 1 min read

Hi again ๐Ÿ‘‹ A question for you this week: what does your accessibility scanner tell you? If you have one running, whether it came with your platform or a developer set it up, it is doing useful work. It will catch missing alt text, low contrast, or an unlabelled field. Those are real problems worth fixing, and it will find them faster than any person could. Here is the part I find interesting though. A scanner can only measure what a machine is able to see. So it cannot tell you whether...

21 days agoย โ€ขย 1 min read