Accessibility Statement

Shopify Accessibility compliance statement

Date of creation: 20-12-2024

Date of publication: 02-01-2025

RNIB's Shopify website has been designed and developed with the needs of people with sight loss and disability in mind. We’ve also taken on board international guidance and best practice on web accessibility.

Web accessibility conformance statement

RNIB is committed to testing and delivering all web content on the RNIB Shopify website to WCAG 2.1, level A and AA compliance. We achieve this by testing our web pages and content against the WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA checkpoints and make changes to ensure we meet the success criteria. Our website also undergoes user testing by blind and partially sighted people using a range of assistive technology tools.

The checkpoints we test against are taken from the technical standard Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We test using this standard to ensure that we’re meeting their responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010 and the EU Web Accessibility Directive.

We’re always working to make improvements to the accessibility and usability of the Shopify website, especially where content and delivery is reliant on third party providers.

The Methodology that RNIB follow is WCAG-EM.

Compliance standards (what we test against)

We try our best to ensure we test with a wide range of technologies, but we can’t commit to testing every browser version with every version of assistive technology, nor testing on every operating system version or mobile handset type. We focus on testing with more recent technology, as this enables more security and provides improved accessibility features and accessibility support for users.

Technology we use for testing

We test the website using the following browsers and assistive technology combinations:

  • Microsoft Edge and JAWS 2024 (latest version).
  • Firefox and NVDA (latest version).
  • Chrome with JAWS 2024 (latest version) and NVDA (latest version).
  • iPhone on Safari
  • Windows High contrast mode (Edge and Firefox).
  • In browser magnification up to 400 per cent.
  • Keyboard navigation only.

Third party functionality and services

In some places on our website, we depend on third parties to deliver functionality and services that we cannot perform ourselves. Wherever possible we work with third parties to ensure that the service they provide achieves conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

We cannot guarantee that all our third-party applications and services will always remain accessible and usable due to various updates made by third party suppliers.

External links

RNIB is not responsible for the content of external websites, nor any accessibility issues that may be present on those websites.

PDF documents

PDF documents may present accessibility challenges to users of assistive technology. We will therefore provide an alternative format alongside with any PDF documents distributed.

Legacy support

While we try to ensure support for older browsers, it is not always possible or feasible to continue this support.

We urge those on legacy systems to upgrade, as this will provide the most optimised and secure browsing experience.

Improvements

We are committed to the continual improvement of the accessibility of our website. We achieve this by doing the following:

  • Perform regular accessibility audits.
  • Speaking with our customers and incorporating their feedback to improve our services.
  • Keep up with the latest best practices and evolving standards.

Outstanding accessibility issues

The RNIB Shopify website has been tested extensively, however, we are still making changes and tweaks to improve our website. We have included a list of the known accessibility issues we have found and are currently working on to fix:

  • Visually hidden elements in accordions not entirely hidden. You may discover that some collapsed accordions still present their links to keyboard and screen reader users
  • Some buttons are not as easy to activate as they should be. You may encounter buttons such as the ‘clear all’ button, which could be larger to make it easier to activate
  • Not all of the error validation messages remain on the page until you submit. The error message for limited stock products may disappear when the input focus moves away from the quantity button

There may be issues with some of our alternative colour scheme modes offered on the website:

Dark mode

  • The Email me when back in stock button has contrast issues and does not appear
  • The button that is disabled until conditions are met in the checkout page has contrast issues
  • The ‘Updated successfully’ message may be difficult to perceive due to contrast errors
  • Some text within the article content fails contrast and may be difficult to read

Yellow mode

  • The button that is disabled until conditions are met in the checkout page has contrast issues

Assistive tools

  • Links on the ‘Create account’ page not underlined in yellow mode
  • Status messages are not announced by screen readers. When resetting or setting a password, the status message to confirm the action is successful is currently not announced in preferences
  • Keyboard focus outline unclear: When in the Basket screen the checkbox to accept the T & C’s and terms and conditions link are currently grouped making it look like both the link and checkbox have the keyboard focus outline
  • Link labels are missing unique descriptions: The remove item from basket buttons currently do not reference the product name
  • Product price group is announced twice by the screen reader: There might be a few extra ‘Product prices’ announced when going through individual products

Mobile issues

  • Unable to scroll in mobile landscape view: The full list of filters is not possible to scroll through when using a mobile
  • Resizing text on mobile browsers causes layout issues: Some overlapping of content may occur in the header on the Home Page when using 150% text zoom

Reporting a web accessibility issue

If any accessibility issues are discovered that we have not covered in the outstanding accessibility issues section, please contact us directly at AccessibilityRequests@rnib.org.uk

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