When a website is not accessible, it poses a problem for everyone. People with disabilities are sidelined, abled individuals do not get to enjoy an enhanced user experience, and the website owner gets bad PR.
Moreso, there’s the risk of legal action against the website owner.
As a Shopify store owner, how do you avoid legal action and provide your users with the type of experience they deserve? The simple answer is plugins.
Shopify is a big player in the e-commerce industry, contributing around $319 billion to the global economy between 2016 and 2019. The Shopify economy is expected to grow even more. With so many people getting Shopify stores, web accessibility must become a fundamental part of Shopify website experiences.
Check how to achieve Shopify ADA compliance ✅
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to the nature of digital products that make them accessible to people with disabilities. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), through its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), developed a set of standardized guidelines — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — for the building of accessible products.
These guidelines consist of 13 success criteria and 3 conformance levels to aid web authors, content creators, and web developers in the creation of accessible digital products.
Top Shopify Web Accessibility Plugins
Accessibility Assistant
Developed by Cart Coders, Accessibility Assistant has a 7-day free trial period after which pricing starts from $3.99/month.
The Cart Coders team promises that their plugin makes it easier for people with dyslexia and other disabilities to consume and navigate your website. The accessibility widget can strengthen weak points on websites that may cause accessibility concerns.
It also promises compliance with local accessibility regulations through adherence to the country’s accessibility standards.
Main Features
Keyboard Navigation: Enhances keyboard navigation making it easier for people who use screen readers to navigate your website.
Desaturate: This converts color mode into the black and white mode, for people with color vision problems.
Gigantic Text: As the name itself implies, this option augments the text size up to 4 times.
Cursor: This feature enables immense Cursor and Reading Mode so that users can easily identify where the cursor is on the screen.
Starring Links: This highlights all links on your website for easy identification.
Additional Contrast: This facilitates different modes like Invert color, Dark Color, Light Color mode, etc.
Accessibly
The Team at On the Map Marketing built this plugin. Accessibly has a 7-day free trial period after which pricing starts from $5/month.
It takes only a couple of minutes to install and set it up. Download it, customize the tool based on your website and you are good to go!
Main Features
- Make the site readable – It lets you add a reading line and tooltips to text, and make fonts and links readable and noticeable.
- Enlarge/decrease the size of onscreen text.
- Enlarge cursor.
- Adjust colors – You can change your website’s brightness, contrast, and grayscale.
- Text-to-speech is enabled.
- Languages – You can choose from 6 different languages for the widget.
Overall, it helps with WCAG/ADA compliance and provides an Accessibility Statement template you can customize.
Accessibility Enabler
Accessibility Enabler is from the team at HikeOrders. They have a free plan available
It boasts 30+ accessibility tools that your website visitors can use to enhance their experiences.
Main Features
- Accessibility toolbar that claims to increase website engagement
- Responsive design for mobile and desktop
- Adjustable fixtures for the web page
- Customizable accessibility widget
- GDPR Compliance
- Accessibility Statement, Badge, and Certificate
- Support for multiple languages
- Scroll-to-the-top floating button
Accessibility Toolkit
Developed by Appify Commerce. Accessibility Toolkit has a 15-day free trial period, after which pricing starts at $5.99/month.
Main Features
- Text To Speech
- Invert colors
- Increase / Decrease font size
- Grayscale mode
- Highlight links
- Highlight titles
- Toolkit Customization
- Mobile Friendly
- Easy Installation
- Custom CSS
Conclusion
Lack of compliance with regulatory bodies like ADA and EN301 549 is becoming an increasing cause of lawsuits filed against websites. If your website is built on Shopify I’d recommend giving one of these plugins a try to safeguard yourself and give your users a wholesome experience.
