e-Commerce Exclusion: Web Accessibility and the Older User

The potential exists for an increasing population of older Web users, who tend to have a high disposable income, to become a major factor in the success and profitability of e-Commerce websites. Due to the natural ageing process, this group are subject to a decline in their visual, motor and cognitive abilities. These age-related impairments form the major barriers that adversely affect both Web accessibility and Web usability for the disabled community. As a result, the effect has been to exclude the older Web users from fully benefiting from the e-commerce revolution. This paper investigates the extent to which e-Commerce websites, in Scotland, comply with a subset of WAI guidelines which are considered to be relevant to the accessibility issues for older Web users who have a visual and/or motor disability. An exploratory review, using the websites of 4 major companies in each of the 3 eCommerce sectors (Banking, Retail and Supermarket), was conducted to evaluate the accessibility of the websites from the perspective of an older customer. In addition, older Web users evaluated the usability of these eCommerce websites. The results indicate that whilst some companies have taken steps to ensure that their websites are accessible to older Web users, the majority of websites reviewed failed to address most of the crucial accessibility issues that prevent the inclusion of older Web users into the e-Commerce revolution. Keyboard accessibility is highlighted as the main barrier to accessibility. In particular, the authors recommend that the priority level for WAI Guideline 9.3 (which relates to the specification of logical event handlers rather than device-dependent event handlers), WAI Guideline 9.4 (which relates to the creation of a logical tab order through links), WAI Guideline 13.6 (which relates to the provision of a bypass mechanism for related links) and WAI Guideline 3.4 (which relates to the use of relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values) be raised.