Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
Summary
Online shopping was first premiered in the 1980s, as a way for people who couldn’t shop in-person to easily make purchases. But how far we’ve come! In this talk, Fable’s Accessibility Evangelist Sam Proulx will walk you through some of the key factors to create an online shopping experience that is accessible to everyone. From his perspective as a full time screen reader user, and drawing on Fable’s thousands of hours working with people with disabilities, Sam will highlight how consistency, convenience, confidence, and customizability enable a smooth experience for all users, disabled or not. Let’s bring online shopping back to its accessibility roots!
Key Insights
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Consistency in the checkout process enables users with disabilities to learn one workaround and reuse it, greatly reducing cognitive load.
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Autofill and autocomplete features depend on properly labeled form fields, improving convenience for users with physical and cognitive challenges.
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Session timeouts that do not save user progress disproportionately affect users with disabilities and hurt conversion rates.
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Confidence is key in retail checkout because users entrust their money; inaccessible flows cause users with disabilities to abandon purchases sooner.
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Providing multiple payment methods and purchase pathways (like app, web, voice) increases customizability and accessibility.
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People with disabilities often prefer brands with consistent experiences enough to pay more rather than switch to cheaper, less accessible competitors.
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Inaccessible checkout experiences lead users to assume the product or service itself will also be inaccessible.
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Accessibility is a journey, not a one-time project; ongoing involvement of people with disabilities in testing is critical.
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Frequent, bite-sized training for frontline staff is often overlooked in accessibility for in-person service environments.
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Leading companies like Apple and Microsoft exemplify accessible shopping experiences by blending ease of use, security, and customizability.
Notable Quotes
"When you design for the edges, you make things better, more fluid, more customizable for everyone."
"Consistency is so important that sometimes even consistency in failure works if it means I only have to learn the workaround once."
"If you have to learn a workaround, you want to learn it once and reuse it again and again."
"We often say don’t make me think. When that’s not possible, reuse and recycle those learnings."
"I’ve nearly bought products in my sleep because I memorized the key presses from consistent checkout flows."
"Timely interactions that log users out without saving progress cause abandonment, especially for people with disabilities."
"Confidence is a higher burden in retail because people are giving real money; inaccessible flows cause quick abandonment."
"More ways to contact support—chat, email, phone—are essential because different disabilities require different options."
"Accessibility isn’t a checkbox you run automated tests for; you must involve people with disabilities to benchmark success."
"Frequent, bite-sized training is crucial so staff actually remember how to support customers with disabilities."
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