# Six accessibility failures are blocking sales on almost every online store. Here is how to find yours. ## Summary WebAIM's 2026 Million report identified six recurring issues that account for 96% of accessibility errors on the web. For online stores, each one is a drag on conversion. This article shows you how to find them on your own store in five minutes. - 95.9% of the top one million home pages have issues that block at least some customers from completing a purchase. - Online stores perform worse than the web average. Shopify stores averages 36.6% more issues per page than the typical site. - 96% of these issues come from the same six problems, and the same six have topped the list every year for seven years. - Stores that fix the basics enter the rare 4.1% that are open to every customer for business. If you run an online store, [WebAIM's 2026 Million report](https://webaim.org/projects/million/) is worth your attention, because almost everything it identifies is a customer who tried to buy from a site like yours, but couldn't. Collectively, that is [costing UK businesses an estimated £17 billion every year](/blog/black-friday-cyber-monday-sales-advantage). Here's how to make sure you're not missing out on that. That is the framing I would ask you to hold onto while you read the rest of this article. Accessibility, as a topic, is often easy to file under "_important but not urgent_". Lost sales aren't. Every lost sale is a customer who tried to buy from you and couldn't, and the report is a list of the most common reasons why. Some of the numbers are striking. 95.9% of the top one million home pages have accessibility failures that block at least some customers from completing a purchase. And that number got worse this year, after six years of slow improvement - with online stores sitting among the worst performing categories in the entire report. [Shopify sites averaged 36.6% more issues than the typical page on the web](/blog/shopify-checkout-accessibility-product-pages/). Although it's worth noting that Shopify Checkout is highly accessible - it's the product pages which are letting you down. The useful number, though, is 96%. That is the share of every issue WebAIM detected, across 56 million failures across a million sites, that comes from just six recurring problems. **The same six failures have topped the list every year for seven years.** This is a short, stable, well-documented list of fixable issues. And the stores that work through this list and fix their failures end up in the rare 4.1% that are open to every customer for business, regardless of how those customers browse the web. The other 95.9% keep losing orders to the same six failures, year after year, while everyone wonders why their conversion rate is stuck. ## TL;DR for business leaders - **Problem:** 96% of the issues stopping customers from buying come from six recurring failures, and online stores rank among the worst performers. - **Impact:** Customers cannot complete purchases, your acquisition spend is wasted on traffic that bounces, and your store sits with the 95.9% rather than the rare 4.1%. - **Fix:** Run a 5-minute diagnostic on the four pages that matter most, then work through the six issues in order of prevalence. - **Result:** A measurable drop in unexplained drop-off, more completed orders, and a competitive position most of your category is failing to claim. ## Run this 5-minute test before you read on Open Chrome, go to your busiest product page, and run [Google PageSpeed Insights](/start-here/product-page-accessibility-guide/) on the URL. You are looking at the **Accessibility** score, not Performance. Scroll down to the audits section and you will see a list of issues. Most of what shows up there will map to one of the six problems below. Now do the same on your home page, a category page, and your checkout. Five minutes, four pages, and you have a list of every automated issue on the journey your customers are actually walking. **Two caveats before we go further.** Automated tools find roughly 30% of issues that block customers. They are very good at finding the six failures in this article, because all six are mechanical and easy for software to detect. They are not good at the harder questions: does this make sense to a screen reader user, does this dropdown announce the right thing when a customer changes a size, can someone using only a keyboard actually get to your "add to bag" button without giving up first. For that, you need a human eye, which is the gap that [accessibility reviews](/reviews/) are designed to close. A clean automated score also does not mean a perfectly accessible store. It means you have cleared the lowest bar. The reason that bar matters is that 96% of customers who get blocked are getting blocked at it. **Onto the six.** ## 1. Low contrast text (found on 83.9% of stores) Low contrast text is the most common problem on the web. WebAIM found an average of 34 separate instances of low contrast text on _every home page they tested_, up 15% in a single year. Low contrast text often shows up as light grey body copy on white, white text laid over a pale lifestyle photo, or a brand colour button that looks crisp on the designer's monitor and washes out in sunlight. Sale tags are a regular offender, because the background flips between light and dark depending on the product image behind them. **Who this blocks:** anyone with low vision, plenty of customers over 50, anyone with cataracts, anyone reading on a phone outside, anyone with a cheap monitor, anyone tired at the end of a working day. In practice, a meaningful chunk of your customers some of the time, including a lot of customers who would never describe themselves as having a disability. **Sales cost:** people skim before they read. If your price, your "add to bag" button, your shipping copy, or your sale flag is hard to read, you lose them in the first second. They will not know they bounced because of contrast. They will just feel the page was hard work and go somewhere easier. **How to spot it:** in PageSpeed Insights, look for the audit named "Background and foreground colours have a sufficient contrast ratio". Expand it to see every failing element on the page, with the contrast ratio it currently has and the ratio it needs. If you want to understand the science behind _why_ the ratio matters, here is a [full breakdown of WCAG colour contrast and the 4.5:1 ratio](/blog/wcag-colour-contrast-explained/). To stress-test how your contrast holds up under real use, [testing with browser zoom](/reviews/browser-zoom-testing/) shows what happens when a customer increases their browser zoom to read a page more comfortably, which a lot of older customers do as a default. **What fixing it looks like:** mostly a design system fix. Pick contrast-safe defaults for body text, buttons, links, and labels, and stop overriding them with brand colours that fail. Most failures on a typical store come from three or four colour combinations being repeated across the site, so once you fix the system, the page-by-page work is small. **What to brief your developer:** audit every text/background colour combination in the design system, adjust any that fail 4.5:1 (body text) or 3:1 (large text and UI components) until they pass, and update the design tokens so the fix propagates across the codebase. ## 2. Missing or weak alt text (53.1% of stores) This one matters more for ecommerce than almost any other category, because product images carry a huge part of the buying decision. The WebAIM report found that one in five linked images on the average home page has no alt text. On a product page, that means a screen reader user will often hear the filename, or just "image", instead of a description of what they are about to buy. Product images often show more than then written description covers (the fit, how it looks on the model, the way the fabric drapes, what the back of the product looks like) so the customer is left making a buying decision with half the information. The [full guide to writing alt text for product images](/blog/how-to-write-alt-text-for-product-images/) covers what good descriptions look like across product photography, lifestyle imagery, and variants. The short version is below. **Who this blocks:** screen reader users, obviously. But also anyone whose connection failed to load the image (more common than you might think), anyone using a text-based browser, and Google's image crawler, which is increasingly how products get surfaced in search and AI-generated answers. There is a separate piece on [how AI is becoming a sales channel that depends on accessibility](/blog/ai-as-a-sales-channel-accessibility/), and alt text is a large consideration. **Sales cost:** if your product images do not carry their meaning into alt text, you become invisible to a slice of buyers. The slice is small in absolute terms, but it is also a slice your competitors are usually not serving either, which makes it disproportionately winnable. **How to spot it:** in PageSpeed Insights, look for the audit named "Image elements have `[alt]` attributes". This catches images missing alt text entirely, but it will not catch weak or repetitive alt text (every image on a page being called "product image" or just the product name). For that, [this video on effective alt text for product pages](/reviews/effective-product-alt-text/) walks through what good and bad alt text actually look like in real use. **What fixing it looks like:** there is a [full guide to writing alt text for product images](/blog/how-to-write-alt-text-for-product-images/) for the long version. The short version: describe what is relevant about the image to someone making a buying decision. The colour, the cut, the texture, the use case. Not "a t-shirt". A t-shirt in what? If you are using AI to generate alt text, be careful. [A test of three AI alt text generators](/blog/can-ai-be-used-to-write-good-descriptive-alt-text/) showed mixed results. AI is a useful first draft, not a finished answer, and the gap between draft and finished is where the sales sit. **What to brief your developer (and your content team):** make sure every image element has an `alt` attribute (even if empty for decorative images). On Shopify, WooCommerce, and most modern platforms, alt text lives on the image in the admin panel, so the content team can fix existing products without developer time. Bake it into the standard product upload process so the problem stops reappearing. ## 3. Missing form labels (51% of stores) Half the web has at least one form field with no proper label. For a store, that almost always shows up in two places: the search bar in the header, and somewhere in checkout. A form label is the bit of text that tells the customer what to type into a field. The common workarounds are to use placeholder text inside the field as a substitute, or to lean on an icon (a magnifying glass for search, for example) and assume that is enough. Neither works well. Placeholder text disappears the moment the field has focus, which is a problem for anyone who looks away mid-typing or has memory or attention difficulties. Icons get ignored by screen readers entirely. This is the highest-stakes failure on the list, because it directly hits the part of your store where money changes hands. A confusing checkout form costs you sales from every customer, not only disabled ones. The accessibility fix and the conversion fix are, in this case, the same fix, which is why this would normally be the place to start for any store doing meaningful volume. **How to spot it:** in PageSpeed Insights, look for the audit named "Form elements have associated labels". To see the pattern at full scale, [this review of the Vitality life insurance form](/reviews/vitality/) walks through what goes wrong on a real form when labels are not done well, and what the fixes look like step by step. **What fixing it looks like:** every form field gets an associated label. The label should be visible, not just announced to assistive technology, because everyone benefits from a label that does not disappear. The proper HTML pattern is `