The State of Ecommerce Accessibility 2026


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, you can probably guess what came top overall: colour contrast failed on 80% of pages. I keep going on about it because it's probably the easiest one to fix.

If you want to geek out on how the stores were chosen and tested, it's all written up.

Shopify and WooCommerce checkouts are both highly accessible and they have both spent a considerable amount of time and resources ensuring this - but they can only fix the parts they control. The rest comes from your side of the fence, which usually means the theme, whatever apps have been bolted on over the years, and whoever uploads the product photos. So who in your business would actually notice if a new app broke your product page for keyboard users? If nobody springs to mind, that's worth sorting out.

Where does your product page sit?

You can check your own product page against the data.

Put in your best-selling product page and a private result comes back by email, usually within the hour. It shows where your page sits against others on the same platform, three things to fix first, and the full technical detail to pass on to whoever looks after your site.

Talk soon,
Dave

P.S. After you've run it on your own product pages, hit reply and tell me what was top of your list. I read every reply.

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

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...

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...

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...