This document discusses how to make a WooCommerce online store accessible. It notes that people with disabilities represent a large portion of the population and can be important customers. The document recommends testing the store's accessibility using free online tools like WAVE and Access Monitor. It also describes plugins like Accessibility Widget, wA11y, and WP Accessibility that can help address common accessibility issues in WordPress and WooCommerce sites. The conclusion is that making a store accessible improves the user experience for all and can increase visitors and conversions.

1. How to make your
WooCommerce store accessible
Presentation by Rafael Minuesa from AccessibleWeb
Original Post at: https://prowoos.com/make-woocommerce-store-accessible/

2. There are many owners of online stores who
seem to think that their websites are of no
interest to people with disabilities, or that the
percentage of people with disabilities that
could visit their stores is so small, that
investing on making their websites
accessible is not worth it. But statistical facts
tell a completely different story.

3. According to the the World Health
Organization, as of 2017 there are at least
285 million people visually impaired
worldwide. Of those, 39 million are blind and
246 million suffer from low vision. If we also
take into account the number of people
suffering from refractive errors, the total
number is between 800 and 2.300 millions.

4. Only in the U.S. there are close to 60 million
people with disabilities. But if we only take
into account sight and hearing impairments
we find that these affect over 7% of the
population age 15 years and older, and 22%
of over 65 years old. 82% of these also
suffer from difficulty grasping objects, such
as a computer mouse.

6. All these statistical facts prove that those
you previously may have dismissed as a
minority of people with disabilities, are in fact
a large and important group of people, who
in many cases have the financial resources
and the experience to become an important
customer of your online store, whether they
buy products for themselves, or in many
other cases for relatives and friends.

7. They can even be the very same people who
purchased products from your website not
long ago, but because of a deteriorating
health condition or an accident, they may no
longer be able to browse through your
website and are forced to surf away to an
accessible website in order to find similar
products they can purchase.

8. Once you realize how important it is to make your
online store accessible, the next step forward
involves testing your website from the point of
view of a person who suffers from any of the
disabilities that affect access to the Web,
including visual, auditory, physical, speech,
cognitive, and neurological disabilities.

9. Tools
There are free online tools that
can help you emulate the user
experience of a person with
disabilities trying to navigate a
website.
● WAVE
● Access Monitor
● Accessibility Widget
● wA11y
● WP Accessibility

10. WAVE
WAVE shows accessibility information in different Views:
1. Styles View presents your page with the
embedded accessibility icons and indicators.
2. No Styles View displays your page with styles
disabled and tables linearized.
3. Contrast View shows only contrast issues on
your page.
4. Code View tab at the bottom of the page allows
you to view the underlying markup of the page.
http://wave.webaim.org/

11. The ‘Access Monitor’ does two things to help you test
your site for accessibility.
1. It automates your accessibility site audits by
scheduling weekly or monthly reports, and get
notified each time one runs. You can test a
specific set of pages, and return a list of different
accessibility issues.
2. It only reports accessibility issues that are
machine-testable, and although you can miss
some issues that way, in the end it will save you
time sent otherwise with false positives.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/access-monitor/
Access Monitor

12. The ‘Accessibility Widget’ plugin adds a sidebar widget
to change text size in your WordPress or
WooCommerce site, customizing the following settings.
1. Resize the content inside HTML and CSS tags.
2. Set font sizes.
3. Set controller text.
4. Set tooltip text on mouse hover.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/accessibility-widget/
Accessibility Widget

13. The ‘wA11y – The Web Accessibility Toolbox’ plugin is
open source software that helps you evaluate and
improve the accessibility of your website or online store
by providing information, education, resources, and
tools.
This resource is Open-Source and WPCampus would
love for you to contribute. Visit the WPCampus
Resources repo to learn how to contribute.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wa11y/
wA11y

14. The ‘WP Accessibility’ plugin helps you to easily deal with a
variety of common accessibility problems in WordPress and
WooCommerce Themes by adding a number of helpful
accessibility features such as:
● Enable skip links with WebKit support by enqueuing
JavaScript support for moving keyboard focus.
● Add skip links with user-defined targets.
● Add language and text direction attributes to HTML
● Add a :focus outline to focusable elements.
● Toggle for high-contrast and large font stylesheets
● Add support for the longdesc attribute
https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/handbook/whic
h-tools-can-i-use/wp-accessibility-plugin/
WP Accessibility

15. Conclusion
All these pieces of software should be enough to provide you with
enough resources to help make your WooCommerce store accessible
for just about everyone.
If you do things right you will improve the user experience of both
people without disabilities and of those whose disabilities force them to
struggle to make sense of the structure and content of your site.
This will eventually be picked up by Search Engines and translate into
a spike in visitors, which will affect the conversion rate of your website.