Creating an Accessible eCommerce Platform

Assessing key pages

Waitrose is a chain of British supermarkets, forming the food retail division of Britain’s largest employee-owned retailer, the John Lewis Partnership. Its head office is in Bracknell, Berkshire, England. As of October 2013, Waitrose has 300 branches across the United Kingdom, including 30 “little Waitrose” convenience stores, and a 4.9% share of the market, making it the sixth-largest grocery retailer in the UK.

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We were asked by Waitrose to assess several key pages for accessibility compliance against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 on their new website and where possible suggest remedial work on the items we identified to the various design and build agencies involved.

Tools, guidance and prioritisation

We performed a manual inspection of the source code using a standard web browser and used lightweight tools such as the W3C Online HTML and CSS Validators, AIS Accessibility Toolbar and AIS Colour Contrast Analyser (based on WAI algorithm) as part of our technical testing. We also performed a JAWS screen reader expert review using JAWS 10.

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We gathered requirements and performed the manual testing using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 as a checklist and also provided further guidance and prioritsation of the results as required by Waitrose and were also tasked with writing the company accessibility statement for the website.

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Finally, one-on-one interviews at the end of the study allowed the moderators to gain further insight into users’ behaviour and understand their feelings towards various devices at various stages of the job-seeking process.

Accessibility for the future

Influenced the planning of future projects and the importance of accessibility within the company.