Thanks for your response!

Many top e-commerce platforms don’t have a front-end “out of the box” experience. It would be great if the few platforms that do have them (e.g. WCS) would make a demo store that was accessible out of the box. It wouldn’t be hard to fix the few basic issues that exist in it and dramatically improve it. I do see a trend lately of companies using a headless commerce implementation, meaning that they use the out of the box features and functionalities of a given platform on the back end, but they create a custom front end themselves. There is no constraint on making the front end of these storefronts accessible. The only limitation is peoples’ knowledge, and the existing processes to create an e-commerce storefront within agencies that usually don’t include testing them with a screen reader, or reviews to ensure they were designed in an accessible way.

People who cannot necessarily use a mouse pointing device and need to use a keyboard or a screen reader cannot be universally categorized as to what goods and services they may or may not benefit from using online. We can’t exclude people, especially the people who would potentially benefit most from online services. My daughter asked me the other day how blind people do their grocery shopping. She was holding a smooth cereal box and rubbing her hand across it as she asked me. She pointed out that this cereal box felt like any other. How would a blind person know what kind of cereal it was? But they would know, if they ordered it online and the screen reader read out a descriptive link label to them. It would be the easiest thing in the world. And it’s also usually easier than anyone would think to make an experience work that way, if only we planned in advance and tested with the proper tools.