As Online Grocery Expands, Digital Accessibility Becomes a New Challenge for Grocers

In January, Save-On-Foods updated its app to better serve customers during the pandemic, but inadvertently created barriers for visually impaired consumers. When one customer, Richard Marion, reported the issue to the Western Canadian chain without success, he took his experiencetoa local TV station, eventually receiving an apology from the company.

Experts note that the pandemic accelerated the adoption of online grocery shopping by several years. But this growth has also intensified scrutiny of grocery websites and apps regarding accessibility, especially their friendliness to disabled consumers.

This is prompting retailers and e-commerce service providers to place greater emphasis on digital accessibility. However, companies admit they face a dilemma of unclear legal definitions. While grocery stores' physical locations are considered public accommodations under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, courts across the U.S.have ruled inconsistently on whether such accommodations extend to websites and apps.。

Retailers are awaiting new website accessibility regulations from the Department of Justice (DOJ). The agency began this work over a decade ago but paused it in 2017, when itsaid it needed to reassesswhether new regulations were "necessary and appropriate."

As guidelines evolve and litigation continues to rise, grocers and e-commerce service providers are striving to figure out best practices for accessible digital design and maintenance.

"It's not simply flipping a switch and the website magically becomes compliant," said Stephanie Sheridan, a partner at law firm Steptoe & Johnson. She represents retailers and has experience handling digital accessibility cases.

Benefits of digital accessibility

Sources told Grocery Dive that grocers with websites and apps should proactively build and maintain their digital assets with accessibility in mind. Otherwise, they may face costly lawsuits, public backlash, and limit their customer base and pool of potential employees.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 61 million American adults—26% of the population—have some type of disability. Accessibility needs span cognitive, behavioral, visual, hearing, and other types of impairments. For example, online shoppers with visual impairments may use screen readers, braille displays, magnification, or high-contrast modes, while those with hearing impairments may rely on captions.

Brian Moyer, CEO of e-commerce service provider Freshop, said that sales from shoppers using screen readers account for about 0.5% of revenue for most of Freshop's grocery clients, but can reach as high as 20% for the few clients specifically dedicated to attracting disabled shoppers.

"It's not simply flipping a switch and the website magically becomes compliant."

— Stephanie Sheridan, partner at Steptoe & Johnson

Michele Landis, co-founder and chief revenue officer of web accessibility company Accessible360, said that proactively managing digital accessibility is more cost-effective and easier than fixing issues after the fact. The company audits corporate websites for accessibility and provides support.

"When you build a new house, you put in the outlets before the drywall goes up—that's what we're doing now," Landis said. She noted that companies can receive a "sneak peek" version of accessible design before a website or app is built.

Landis said that companies often see improvements in search engine optimization after enhancing digital accessibility. Technical components, such as adding alternative text (alt text, brief text descriptions of images) and improving site navigation,can enhance user experienceand may help the site rank higher in search results.

"An accessible website can make your SEO take off," Landis said.

Designing for people with disabilities

Many companies follow accessibility guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide technical specifications with testable criteria, categorized bythree levels of conformancefrom the minimum (Level A) to acceptable (Level AA) to best (Level AAA). The latest version of WCAGis expected to be released later this year.。

These guidelines, while detailed, still require interpretation. Jess Richman, senior vice president of product and design at Rosie, said the e-commerce service provider spent nearly a year and "significant investment"to raise its compliance level. Its platform now allows users to stop GIF animations, switch to high-contrast mode, adjust font sizes, and turn on or off a feature that renders the site in black and white.

From an engineering and design perspective, achieving digital accessibility means addressing a wide range of features, such as coding images so screen readers can recognize them, said Sylvain Perrier, president and CEO of grocery e-commerce platform Mercatus Technologies. Alt text must be accurate and distinctive.

"[Alt text] can't always be peach, peach, peach, peach, peach, peach. Alt text has to... say this is a Georgia peach, this is peach punch juice," Perrier said.

Example of accessibility features turned off (left) and on (right) in the Rosie app.

An ongoing challenge is that retailers or e-commerce service providers may introduce new barriers when regularly updating websites or apps. "Because our platform gives retailers a lot of flexibility and control, sometimes our retailers may not realize they are building inaccessible content," Perrier said.

Freshop's Moyer said he has had to point out inaccessible elements to grocery clients, such as reminding them that newly added calendar features or uploaded PDF files are unusable for people using assistive technology.

To catch accessibility barriers as they arise, companies are using automated scanning tools and partnering with audit firms specializing in digital accessibility. For example, Richman said Rosie combines internal audits and scanning tools like Wave and Google Lighthouse to monitor desktop and mobile sites.

But Landis cautioned retailers against relying solely on scanning tools, which are like spell checkers that catch grammar errors because they only cover about 25% to 30% of WCAG guidelines. For instance, a scanning tool can identify whether an image has alt text, but cannot discern what the alt text says or whether it is helpful to shoppers.

Sheridan advises grocers to vet accessibility audit firms in advance and understand whether these firms will stand behind their work and issue conformance letters if legal challenges arise. She noted that such firms have "sprung up like mushrooms," trying to monetize the growing demand for website monitoring.

"The gold standard for testing whether a website is truly compliant is to have a blind person navigate it and see what they encounter," she said.

The need for regulation

Sources say WCAG guidelines are just a starting point; stronger oversight and government regulation are also needed.

"WCAG guidelines are just guidelines—they are not law," Sheridan said.

This raises some thorny questions for retailers and e-commerce companies: Does every element on a website or app need to be accessible? If third-party tools, such as maps or store locators, don't work with assistive technology, who is responsible?

A braille display.

Amid this ambiguity, lawsuits against retailers for inaccessible websites and apps are piling up. A small number of plaintiffs have fileddozens of lawsuits。

against numerous companies. "Hundreds of lawsuits are filed every week. Behind each lawsuit, there may be about 100 demand letters sent," Landis said.

Landis and Sheridan said most legal claims are eventually dismissed or settled. One retailer that fought back, Winn-Dixie, successfully appealed a lower court ruling from 2017 that required its website to be accessible, a case that has become aclosely watched precedent。

in the digital accessibility space under the ADA. Sources say that given the current regulatory landscape, grocers can only decide for themselves whether and when to strive for a certain WCAG level, and then maintain it thereafter.

"The DOJ and the government should play a bigger role here," Sheridan said. "They shouldn't let this become the 'Wild West,' where plaintiff lawyers sue companies that are like 'sitting ducks.'"

Sheridan is hopeful about getting more federal guidance and oversight, partly because President Joe Biden was one of the original co-sponsors of the ADA, andhas advanced disability rights through executive orders and initiativesduring his tenure.

She advises companies to post an "accessibility statement" on their websites, stating that the company is committed to digital accessibility efforts and providing contact information for people to report issues. For example,Albertsons' statementsays the grocer conducts regular testing and works with the American Foundation for the Blind to strive to maintain WCAG 2.0 AA standards.

For now, some grocers prioritize digital accessibility more than others. Irene Cooper, project manager at Lake Region IGA in Hawley, Pennsylvania, said digital accessibility only became a priority recently. "We've discussed it in the store, but never considered it online," she said.

Cooper said that when its e-commerce service provider Rosie began working toward higher WCAG levels, the grocer realized what a difference digital accessibility could make for online shoppers.

"For a single-store operation like ours to keep up and compete with big-box stores, we need to consider accessibility and show that you care about customers," Cooper said.