Retail accessibility in 2026: what the new data shows
New research on UK website accessibility places retail among the least accessible sectors for disabled users. Based on Google PageSpeed Insights Accessibility Scores for more than 1,200 UK websites across 14 industries, 63% of retail sites require accessibility improvements, alongside 64% of fashion retailers, 70% of hospitality brands and 79% of travel and tourism sites. By contrast, only 8% of council websites need improvement, a gap that is widely linked to tighter enforcement of WCAG-based legal obligations for public-sector digital services.
This picture is reinforced by complementary studies focused specifically on retail: an analysis of the 100 most popular UK retail brands found that 84% of their homepages contain issues that can create critical barriers for disabled users and that every tested homepage breaches at least one WCAG 2.1 AA requirement. The most common problems include missing labels on links and buttons, insufficient text contrast and poor alternative text for images. Together, these datasets indicate that a large part of UK e-commerce currently fails to offer a reliably usable experience for customers with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairments.
Why this matters commercially, not just ethically and legally
Around one in four adults in the UK lives with a disability, and their aggregate spending power – often referred to as the “purple pound” – is estimated at about £274 billion a year. Charity and expert estimates cited in the research suggest that poor accessibility puts a significant portion of this spending at risk, with projections of up to £120 billion in potential lost revenue for retailers due to inaccessible experiences. Surveys show that the consequences are immediate at the checkout: more than half of consumers report abandoning purchases because of accessibility issues, and a majority of disabled users say they will leave a website altogether if navigation is difficult or interactions are confusing.
For e-commerce operators, this turns accessibility into a core growth lever rather than a marginal compliance exercise. Retailers compete on conversion rates measured in fractions of a percent; losing even a small share of traffic because buttons are unlabeled for screen readers, form fields lack clear instructions or font sizes are too small substantially depresses revenue over time. In peak periods such as Black Friday, sales events or seasonal campaigns, accessibility defects create a multiplier effect: higher media spend drives more traffic into buying journeys that a significant share of users cannot complete.
Legally, the Equality Act 2010 requires UK businesses that provide goods or services, including online, to make reasonable adjustments and to anticipate barriers instead of waiting for complaints. In parallel, the European Accessibility Act, now enforceable in the EU, embeds WCAG-based digital accessibility benchmarks into consumer protection and product rules. While UK retailers are no longer directly bound by EU law, many serve EU consumers and therefore face both compliance expectations and competitive pressure from operators who treat accessibility as a differentiator rather than an afterthought.
Content infrastructure: from catalog design to feed generation
Accessibility problems in retail rarely stem only from page templates or front-end code. They are tightly coupled with how product content is created, structured and distributed through the stack – from PIM and CMS to feed management and on-site merchandising.
In typical e-commerce architectures, product information and assets are syndicated to multiple channels via structured feeds: marketplaces, comparison shopping engines, social commerce placements and paid media formats. When accessibility is not embedded upstream – for example, when alt-text fields are left empty in the PIM, when buttons are defined without semantic labels, or when color information is only encoded visually in images – these issues propagate across every downstream placement. This leads to a systemic exclusion of disabled users from large portions of the retail discovery and purchase funnel.
For search and discovery, accessibility also intersects with technical SEO. Major search engines increasingly assess usability signals, including aspects related to accessibility such as mobile friendliness, readability and interaction stability. Although accessibility scoring is not the only factor in rankings, there is growing consensus, reflected in industry commentary, that accessible sites tend to perform better in search because they are easier to parse, navigate and understand, both for users and for crawlers. In practice, descriptive link text, structured headings, consistent labeling and properly tagged images improve both assistive technology support and organic visibility.
Impact on product feeds and catalog standards
From a content operations perspective, the Warbox data exposes a structural gap between sectors like councils and charities, which keep content compact and clearly structured to meet WCAG, and retail, where visual appeal and marketing copy often take precedence. For product catalogs, this has several implications:
Semantic richness becomes a baseline requirement.
Accessible catalogs rely on precise, machine-readable attributes: color must be expressed as text, size as structured metadata, material and care instructions as clearly labeled fields rather than embedded in lifestyle imagery. This benefits assistive technologies and also supports better filtering, faceting and recommendation performance.Image and video assets must carry full descriptive context.
Alternative text for images is one of the most frequently missing elements in current retail audits. This is not just a checkbox: alt-text is often the only way a blind or low-vision shopper can interpret product images, variant differences or key features. For content infrastructure, that means defining mandatory alt-text workflows in DAM or PIM systems, enforcing field completion via validation rules, and standardizing style guidelines so descriptions are informative but concise.Feed schemas need to embed accessibility-critical fields.
Many export schemas currently prioritize commercial fields (price, availability, GTIN, category) while treating accessibility-related content like alt-text, ARIA roles or long descriptions as optional or ignoring them altogether. As retailers refresh their feed templates for 2026 and beyond, adding required fields for descriptive text, accessible URLs (for example, avoiding fragment identifiers that break screen readers) and programmatic labeling will be part of future-proofing multi-channel content.Error handling and form standards shape conversion.
One of the most frequent conversion-killing issues in accessibility testing is poorly implemented forms: missing labels, ambiguous error messages, or instructions conveyed only via color. Checkout feeds into multiple systems (payments, fraud, loyalty, delivery), but the front-end interaction layer is where accessibility is won or lost. Standardizing validation patterns, keyboard navigation and error messaging across all form-driven flows (registration, checkout, returns, subscription management) becomes a catalog and UX governance issue, not just a design task.
Quality and completeness of product detail pages
The research underlines that insufficient accessibility is often the result of content decisions as much as technical ones. For product detail pages (PDPs), this surfaces in three key dimensions.
First, completeness: disabled users are disproportionately sensitive to missing or fragmented information because they cannot always rely on visual inference. If sizing information is only shown in a lifestyle photo, or if crucial compatibility details are buried in an image carousel without text equivalents, a significant share of shoppers will simply be unable to verify whether the product meets their needs. This drives higher abandonment and, where purchases do occur, increased returns.
Second, structure: accessible PDPs require logical heading hierarchies, scannable sections and predictable layouts. Many of the sectors performing better in accessibility rankings lean on straightforward content patterns: short paragraphs, clear calls to action, limited decorative noise. Retail PDPs, by contrast, often accumulate marketing modules, UGC, cross-sells and promotions, creating dense, complex pages. Without strict content governance and semantic HTML, this can overwhelm assistive technologies and confuse users who rely on keyboard navigation or screen readers.
Third, media and interaction components: features such as 360-degree viewers, interactive size guides, embedded video or AR try-ons introduce new accessibility risks if they are not fully keyboard-operable or lack text alternatives. As retailers experiment with richer experience layers, every new widget must be evaluated against WCAG criteria and integrated into the design system in an accessible form, rather than added as isolated, visually-driven features.
Speed of assortment onboarding and scalable accessibility
A common concern in retail is that accessibility slows down assortment expansion: adding mandatory alt-text, testing color contrast and validating semantic structure may look like friction in fast-moving catalog operations. However, the current data suggests the opposite: ignoring accessibility introduces operational drag later in the lifecycle through increased support tickets, cart abandonment, failed checkout attempts and ad hoc fixes.
To keep time-to-shelf competitive while raising accessibility standards, retailers can treat accessibility as an integral part of content production rather than a post-publication check:
Templates-first approach.
If PDP, PLP and campaign templates are designed and coded to meet WCAG from the outset, content teams can focus on structured inputs rather than layout decisions. This reduces per-SKU cognitive load and lowers the risk of inconsistent patterns that break assistive workflows.Embedded validation in content tools.
PIM, CMS and feed managers increasingly offer built-in or pluggable accessibility checks: color contrast validators, heading structure analyzers, form label detectors. Integrating these into authoring workflows allows issues to be caught at creation time instead of during manual QA, preserving launch speed.Governance through content models.
Well-defined content models (for example, mandatory “Accessible description” fields for key product categories; controlled vocabularies for color and materials) standardize how information is captured. This not only supports accessibility but also accelerates localization, marketplace onboarding and AI-driven enrichment.
No-code, AI and automation in accessibility workflows
The growing maturity of no-code tools and AI-based assistants is reshaping how retailers can address accessibility at scale.
On the one hand, no-code builders and low-code platforms make it easier for non-technical teams to spin up landing pages, content hubs or promotional microsites. Without guardrails, this can exacerbate accessibility problems: custom layouts, non-standard components and improvised styling frequently fail basic WCAG criteria. To avoid this, retailers adopting no-code stacks are increasingly moving toward centrally governed design systems, where reusable components (buttons, cards, forms, banners) are pre-tested for accessibility and exposed as configurable blocks rather than built from scratch for each page.
On the other hand, AI offers practical ways to reduce the manual burden of accessible content creation. Current applications include:
- Suggesting alt-text for images based on computer vision, which content editors can verify and refine before publishing.
- Flagging contrast issues automatically during design, recommending compliant color pairs.
- Detecting missing labels or inconsistent heading structures in large sets of templates or published pages.
- Generating accessible summaries or expanded descriptions tailored for screen reader users, especially for complex product categories.
Most experts caution that AI outputs still require human review, especially in sensitive contexts and nuanced product categories. Nonetheless, using AI as a first pass can dramatically cut the time needed to bring legacy catalogs closer to accessibility standards without freezing assortment updates. An example of this is the practical application of Artificial Intelligence for Business - NotPIM, which helps to streamline the creation of content.
Strategic implications for e-commerce leaders
The convergence of legal expectations, commercial opportunity and technological capacity suggests that accessibility is evolving from a specialist concern into a core dimension of e-commerce strategy. The contrast between sectors with strong accessibility performance (councils, charities, some public services) and lagging ones (retail, travel, hospitality) highlights that the gap is not primarily about technical difficulty or cost; it is about priorities, governance and content architecture.
For retail and broader e-commerce operations, the current research implies three strategic directions:
- Treat accessibility as part of product and content infrastructure, not only as UI polish. This means embedding standards into feed schemas, PIM models, design systems and authoring workflows.
- Use accessibility metrics alongside traditional KPIs such as conversion rate, average order value and search visibility, recognizing that inaccessible journeys systematically depress performance in ways that simple funnel analytics often fail to attribute.
- Combine no-code agility and AI-powered automation with strong central standards, ensuring that the speed of digital experimentation does not come at the cost of excluding millions of potential customers. Ensuring the quality of product information through the use of services such as Product feed - NotPIM is one example of a solution.
As more commerce moves online and regulations tighten across jurisdictions, accessibility is likely to become a baseline expectation of digital retail rather than a differentiating feature. The sectors that adapt their content processes, catalog structures and automation strategies around inclusive design principles will be better positioned to capture demand, reduce friction and build durable trust with a broader share of their audience. In practice, product detail pages require a comprehensive strategy; for this, it is necessary to consider the challenges, benefits, and implementation of processes, explained in detail in the article Creating a Product Page: From Routine Necessity to Smart Automation - NotPIM.
Sources: InternetRetailing, Warbox Creative, Level Access, PPC Land.
As a provider of PIM solutions, NotPIM recognizes the critical role of accessible content management in the future of e-commerce. This research highlights the shift in focus towards a more inclusive digital landscape, where the quality and structure of product data are paramount. NotPIM is designed to help e-commerce businesses proactively address these challenges. Our platform offers a robust solution for standardizing, enriching, and syndicating product data, including key accessibility features like alt-text management and structured data fields, which are core elements for an inclusive shopping experience. NotPIM's capabilities can be fully realized through the product data preparation process, which is discussed in the article CSV Format: How to Structure Product Data for Smooth Integration - NotPIM.