Subscription pages and accessibility failures

If you get your subscription page right, you can win the same customer month after month

Hi again 👋

If you sell anything on subscription, this one is for you.

First: the scale of the industry of the site I was looking at this week.

The UK fresh flower and plant market is worth, on industry estimates, a massive £2.2 billion a year, and roughly a fifth of that is now spent online. It’s a category that has a huge surge in a few short weeks: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and then not much slack in between. Get it wrong in peak season and there’s no second chances until next year.

Here’s what this week’s review video looks like in practice:

This week I was browsing through one of the bigger UK flower sites without a mouse - the same way millions of people browse each day.

The first thing to notice is that the account and basket links weren’t in the tab order at all, so a keyboard user sails right past them. Without these - there’s no way to reach your account or your basket. And importantly, the choice between a monthly subscription and paying upfront was also unreachable. That’s a basic test.

Then if the user gets as far as the delivery form - they’re invited to add a gift message, a recipient name, address, and postcode.

However - none of these form fields had accessible labels.

So for anyone using a screen reader, each field in the form simply reads out as “Empty textbox”, “Empty textbox”, “Empty textbox.” There’s no non-visual way to tell which box is which - which is the equivalent of stripping every label off the form for a sighted user. At that point they’re left guessing, and I think I’d have given up.

And someone, somewhere, doesn’t get their flowers 💔

A missing label is an incredibly easy fix. Half a days work to fix this page - max.

But let’s look at what it costs

If that page was selling a single £25 bouquet, the bug costs you one sale. £25.

It wasn’t. It was a subscription.

So you don’t lose £25. You lose it this month, and again next month, and every month after, for as long as that customer would have stayed.

Suddenly £25 looks a lot more like £250+.

Same bug. Very different bill. And that’s just for one customer.

Apply it to everyone who hits the same wall during a Valentine’s or Mother’s Day rush, and the page nobody tested turns into an expensive problem.

Testing is often performed using a mouse - but unless you follow the same user journeys as someone using a keyboard or a screen reader - then you’re potentially excluding a meaningful share of the 1 in 4 UK adults who live with a disability.

So a question worth asking this week: when did anyone last try to subscribe to your service using only a keyboard?

If the answer is “never”, that’s the page I’d start with.

📹 Watch this weeks review video

Talk soon,
Dave

P.S. Have you ever spotted something like this on your own product pages? Hit reply and let me know - I read every reply.