Online Stores

Online Stores: 5 Tips to Improve Your Site’s Accessibility

Featured image by Pexels from Pixabay

When designing your Shopify site, you should keep accessibility in mind. Disabled Web users deserve access to the e-commerce sites like online stores, that are revolutionizing modern life.

Meeting the Needs of Visually Impaired Online Shoppers

If you operate a Shopify site, accessibility should be one of your foremost concerns. Besides demonstrating compassion, increasing accessibility can help your bottom line. Naturally, it’s ideal to open up your online store to a broad, diverse swathe of the public. People with visual impairment make up a fairly large proportion of the population. 

To meet the needs of this group, make sure your online stores feature plenty of color contrast. Visually impaired users depend on contrast to differentiate one element of your site from another. You can utilize a contrast ratio tool to determine if your site meets essential minimum contrast standards. Don’t leave out any text when considering contrast. Form fields, links, and headings should all stand out from your background.

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Font Considerations and Alternate Text

The smaller the font you choose, the more important contrast becomes. Of course, you will use small fonts quite sparingly if you are concerned with accessibility on your online store. Underlining links is a helpful way to make links stand out for the visually impaired. Plenty of users will experience your site through mediating technologies. Shopify makes it easy to add ALT text to any images you use for your online shop. You don’t want to merely go through the motions when conceiving ALT text.

A Word About Accessible Text

A big part of accessibility for your online store is ensuring your text is optimized for screen readers. So, don’t skip over header levels or mix up levels. For example, never follow a H2 header with an H4 header. Keeping headers in sequential order is important for meeting the needs of the hearing impaired. Pick a standard font that you can expect most users will read with ease. 

All text should have consistent, reasonable spacing in between words and letters alike. Justified text can be difficult for some users to construe. Even if you are cultivating a classy, high-end brand, you can do that with a simple vocabulary. When it comes to Web writing, less is more. Accessible text meets the public where they are without condescension.

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Catering to International Consumers

Remember that some of your online store customers may not speak English as a first language. In fact, a number of your customers may be very new to English. This is a natural byproduct of conducting business on a global, open network. Meet these users halfway by avoiding needlessly complex jargon. When you are selling great products at the right price, you needn’t use baroque language to promote your inventory. If you cater to the international marketplace, this can help you maintain your revenues during times of economic uncertainty.

These days, you can utilize a number of digital tools to ease your way as you work on Shopify accessibility. Software solutions like AudioEye can help you make your store accessible in a fast, efficient process.

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