In today’s AI-first world, online consumers are sure to encounter AI-powered experiences as they shop. The opportunity for businesses is obvious. AI enables teams to code, build and scale products and platforms with ever-increasing velocity.
However, with great speed comes great risk. The faster your teams code, the more likely it is they’ll make errors, and the more time you’ll need to spend on quality assurance to ensure those issues don’t make it to production.
Accessibility issues can be particularly devastating, leading to everything from loss of market share and brand damage to fines and lawsuits. The revenue implications are staggering. In the U.S. alone, working-aged people with disabilities now hold $675 billion in disposable income — a consumer market equivalent in size to the global beauty and cosmetics industry.
Accessibility is one of the most overlooked, but also one of the most critical, arenas where AI can either help or hurt a business. If the velocity of your AI-powered development isn’t being matched by the speed and capability of your accessibility testing, you’re courting danger.
As we approach the intensity of the holiday shopping season, online retailers should treat accessibility compliance the same way they treat privacy and security, because the risks are comparable. And given that online retail is almost by definition global, you need to be aware of global accessibility compliance requirements.
If, for example, your business made the right choice and pursued General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance to preserve your ability to do business in the European Union (EU), you need to take the same approach with the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Because just as with GDPR, the regulations apply if you’re selling into the EU, whether you’re based there or not. And the EAA is complicated. Each of the 27 EU countries has its own interpretation of the law. If you fail to comply, you could face legal and financial repercussions in 27 different countries!
Compliance risk is just one of many reasons to choose digital accessibility. There is the simple reality of audience size. One in four adults in the U.S. has a disability. Roughly 16% of the global population — some 1.3 billion people — has a disability. If your digital properties aren’t accessible, you’re excluding a huge swath of your potential audience by default. And if that audience doesn’t shop with you, they don’t stop shopping. They turn to your competitors who are accessible.
There are also the new realities of Generative AI search and the business need for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Increasingly, your digital properties are being visited by AI agents and bots, not humans. It has, in fact, been widely reported that agentic AI bots now account for more web requests globally than humans do. Because AI agents perceive web pages much like screen readers, digital accessibility is now a mission-critical GEO strategy.
That’s not to say companies should abandon AI-powered coding. Instead, companies need to ensure their accessibility testing practices are keeping pace. Fortunately, this is doable because the tools already exist, and digital accessibility experts can offer actionable guidance on adapting your processes to succeed in our new, AI-powered world.
There are three things you can tackle right away: closing the AI confidence gap, shifting accessibility testing earlier in your development process, and updating your vendor strategy.
What is the AI confidence gap? Simply put, it’s the difference between how accessible your teams think your code is and how accessible it actually is. This is a very real issue. Recent analysis has found that 88% of engineering leaders report having high or very high trust that their AI-generated code is accessible. However, 35 of 37 of the latest AI models (94.59%) produced multiple critical and serious issues when asked to generate HTML, even when prompted to produce accessible code. Moreover, 64% of developers cite accessibility as a top driver of post-production work. This can be extremely costly, with research showing it’s 30 times more expensive to fix an accessibility issue in production rather than in the design stage.
Which brings us to the next focus area — testing earlier, and often. Accessibility testing is essential to achieve and maintain compliance, but point-in-time audits don’t work in an AI-powered era. Development moves too fast. As noted above, accessibility issues that make it to production are expensive, so you need to embed accessibility testing into your regular workflows earlier so you can catch and fix issues before they become a problem.
Finally, review any third-party software you use. As an online retailer, you’re directly responsible for the accessibility of your websites and apps, even if it was provided by a vendor. A common example is a chatbot you use in your customer service workflow. If it’s not accessible and causes an issue for someone with a disability, your business is liable. To prevent accessibility issues from third-party software entering your ecosystem, include digital accessibility requirements in your vendor contracts and make them enforceable.
Taking steps now to address digital accessibility concerns is one of the best ways to prepare for the holiday shopping season. You’ve got time to create great products, services and experiences for your customers, and if you make those offerings accessible, they’ll translate to revenue without risk, which is the ideal. You want to bring money in, not pay it out. And you want more happy customers, not less. Accessible businesses are successful businesses.
Preety Kumar is the CEO and founder of Deque Systems, where she invented automated digital accessibility testing over twenty years ago. She holds a master’s degree in computer science from George Washington University and previously worked in engineering management for Verizon.
