Team: Reyna Yang, Anita Liao, Christine Dacruz
According to the American Community Survey (ACS), the number of people in the United States with disabilities in 2024 is estimated to be 44 million. With such a large portion of the population experiencing disabilities in their life, Target, being one of the biggest general merchandise retailers in the United States, has the ethical responsibility to offer accessible services on its digital platform. My team is interested in evaluating how Target’s website approaches accessibility. We decided to evaluate one of its many services – scheduling an eye exam.
Target has failed on several accessibility guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in terms of non-text content, headings, and keyboard navigation. According to our evaluation, we found that Target lacks text alternatives for certain images and some accessible names do not match images of text. In addition, Target needs to improve on its keyboard navigation, as many components are skipped when users use the keyboard to tab through the pages. These failed accessibility measures can be detrimental to users with visual impairments. Lastly, Target’s optical site has many incorrect use of headings, when some sections miss proper headings while the others have headings where it’s not needed.
Target’s significant failure in meeting the accessibility guidelines makes us wonder how other e-commerce websites are doing regarding accessibility. From our research, we learned that Baymard Institute conducted a larger-scale accessibility evaluation on 33 top-grossing e-commerce sites against WCAG 2.1AA. From their study, 94% of these sites are noncompliant, with 82% of sites having accessibility issues with images and 64% of sites having accessibility issues with keyboard navigation. It’s concluded that e-commerce websites still have a long way to go when it comes to accessibility, and with how important of a role they play in everyone’s day-to-day life, it’s important for these websites to create more accessible solutions urgently.
Reference
Anniversary of Americans With Disabilities Act: July 26, 2024
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2024/disabilities-act.html#:~:text=44.1%20million%20or%2013.4%%20The%20total%20U.S.,2022.%202022%20American%20Community%20Survey%2C%201%2Dyear%20estimates.
94% of the Largest E-Commerce Sites Are Not Accessibility Compliant
https://baymard.com/blog/accessibility-benchmark-launch
Accessibility on E-commerce Websites: Best Practices for Improving Online Shopping Experiences
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/09/06/accessibility-on-e-commerce-websites-best-practices-for-improving-online-shopping-experiences/