Navigation Impossible : Connecting Factors when Evaluating Accessibility Practices

Abstract: To be able to be an active participant in today’s society, equal access and ease of use on the web is a must since a variety of our day to day activities happen on the web, something that is made more difficult with bad accessibility design. This paper investigated a selection of profit-driven e-commerce sites in regards to how they design for accessibility by evaluating them in accordance to how they comply with WCAG 2.0. This result was then compared to some different factors. The differences found between these factors shed some light on some other factors that should be kept in mind when designing an accessible e-commerce experience, namely how sales-channel dependency and commoditization of product stock may contribute to accessibility design by survivor bias and website complexity. The study found that having a high commoditization of product stock and a high sales-channel dependency correlated with better accessibility design. Furthermore, sites using newer frameworks and/or versions of said frameworks had better measured accessibility than their counterparts, showing that technical choices is a factor that should be considered for accessibility success in practice.