How can you create accessible and responsive e-commerce sites?

1 What is accessibility and why does it matter?

Accessibility means designing and developing your site so that it can be used by everyone, regardless of their abilities, disabilities, or assistive technologies. Accessibility is not only a legal requirement in many countries, but also a moral and business responsibility. By making your site accessible, you can reach a wider audience, improve customer satisfaction, enhance your brand image, and avoid potential lawsuits.

3 How to make your site accessible?

Accessibility is a multi-faceted concept, but when it comes to e-commerce sites, there are some key points to consider. Be sure to use clear and straightforward language, headings, and labels for your content, navigation, and forms. Additionally, provide alternative text for images, icons, and other non-text elements that convey information or functionality. You should also ensure sufficient color contrast between text and background, and avoid using color alone to indicate actions. It’s also essential to use semantic and valid HTML code that follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. Furthermore, enable keyboard navigation and focus indicators for all interactive elements such as links, buttons, menus, and inputs. Don’t forget to provide captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions for audio and video content. Finally, test your site with various assistive technologies like screen readers, magnifiers, or voice input.

4 How to make your site responsive?

Creating responsive sites requires the use of various techniques and tools. For e-commerce sites, the most common are fluid layouts that use relative units, media queries to apply different styles based on device characteristics, flexible images and videos that scale proportionally, responsive web design frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation, and responsive testing tools like Chrome DevTools or Firefox Developer Tools. Fluid layouts and media queries are essential for ensuring the elements of a site fit the available space, while responsive web design frameworks and testing tools make it easier to check how a site looks and behaves on different devices.

5 How to optimize your site for performance?

Performance is a key factor for e-commerce sites, as slow loading or lagging pages can cause customers to become frustrated and leave. To optimize your site for performance, you should minify and compress your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files and use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve them faster. Additionally, you should optimize your images and videos with compression formats such as WebP or AVIF, or use responsive image techniques like srcset or picture. Lazy loading for images and videos is also recommended, as it only loads them when they are in or near the viewport. Browser caching and service workers can be used to store and serve static resources like fonts, icons, or logos, thus reducing the number of requests and downloads. Lastly, it is important to monitor and measure your site's performance with tools like Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix any issues or bottlenecks.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?