We picked ten major fashion e-commerce storefronts. Big ones, the kind with national ad budgets and traffic numbers most brands would kill for. We didn't choose them because we suspected anything was wrong. We chose them for scale, for the sheer volume of shoppers who pass through their checkout flows every day.
Then we ran a full WCAG 2.2 AA review against all ten.
None of them passed.
Not one. Every single storefront failed at least one Level A or AA success criterion, and here's the part that made us sit up: the failures weren't scattered randomly across categories. They clustered, hard, around two specific places on the page. Product photos. And the little swatches you tap to pick a size or a color.
This isn't a takedown post and we're not naming names. What we found is a pattern, and patterns are more useful than call-outs anyway, because a pattern tells you what's probably wrong on your own site right now.
The Stat: 95.9% of the top one million home pages have detectable WCAG 2 failures, and more than 1-in-4 images on popular home pages have missing, questionable, or repetitive alt text. (Source: WebAIM Million, 2026)
What we actually tested
We ran the same methodology across every site: automated scanning for the obvious stuff, then a manual pass with a screen reader through the product listing page, a product detail page, the size/color selector, and checkout. No shortcuts, no single-tool report. We wanted to know what a real shopper using assistive technology would run into, not just what a scanner flags.
The automated numbers alone should have been a warning sign. Nine of the ten storefronts had at least one Level A failure that a browser extension could catch in under a minute. That's not a subtle accessibility nuance. That's a basic build issue that made it all the way to production on a site generating serious revenue.
Failure category one: product photography
Nine of ten sites failed here. Product images either had no alt text at all, or the alt text was generic to the point of uselessness, things like "image1.jpg" or just the product SKU with no description of what the garment actually looks like.
This directly maps to WCAG 1.1.1 Non-text Content, which requires that non-text content have a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose. For a fashion retailer, that purpose is obvious: a screen reader user needs to know the color, the cut, the fabric texture, whatever visual detail is doing the selling for sighted shoppers. When the alt text says nothing, the product is functionally invisible to that shopper.
This isn't an isolated quirk. It lines up with what the WebAIM Million report found looking at the top one million home pages broadly: more than one in four images carry missing, questionable, or repetitive alt text. Our sample suggests the problem gets worse, not better, once you move from a marketing homepage into a product catalog with thousands of SKUs added by different teams over years.
Failure category two: the swatch problem
Eight of ten sites failed here, and this is the one we found more interesting, because it's an easy trap to fall into even when a team cares about accessibility.
Almost every fashion site uses some version of a swatch: a small colored circle for color choice, a small rectangle or pill for size. Visually, they work fine. Programmatically, on eight of our ten sites, they were built as plain div or span elements with a click handler and a background color, no real form control and no ARIA role underneath.
That's a direct hit against WCAG 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value, which requires that for all UI components, the name and role be programmatically determinable and that states be communicated to assistive technology. A screen reader landing on one of these swatches often announced nothing more than "clickable" or, in the worse cases, nothing at all. The shopper had no way to know a size was even selectable, let alone which one was currently chosen.
Failure category three: filters and sort controls
Seven of ten sites failed here. Filter panels and sort dropdowns, the controls that let a shopper narrow a catalog by size, price, or category, frequently used low-contrast text (thin gray-on-white labels) or icon-only buttons with no accessible name. Sighted users skim past this without noticing. Users relying on magnification or a screen reader hit a wall.
The pattern, summarized
| Failure category | Sites affected | Primary criterion |
|---|---|---|
| Product photo alt text missing or generic | 9 of 10 | WCAG 1.1.1 |
| Color/size swatch not announced to screen reader | 8 of 10 | WCAG 4.1.2 |
| Filter/sort controls low contrast or unlabeled | 7 of 10 | WCAG 1.4.3 / 4.1.2 |
If you run a fashion or apparel storefront, here's the quick self-check version of what we ran:
- Every product image has alt text describing color, style, and distinguishing detail, not just a filename or SKU
- Size and color swatches are built on real form controls (radio buttons or buttons with
aria-pressed/aria-checked), not bare divs - The currently selected swatch announces its selected state to a screen reader
- Filter and sort controls meet 4.5:1 text contrast and have a real accessible name, not just an icon
- A full keyboard-only pass through product listing, product detail, and checkout works without a mouse
We've written more broadly about how common these patterns are outside fashion specifically too, if you want the wider view, read our wider audit of 50 self-described accessible sites covers the same failure clusters across a much broader sample.
What none of this required
Nothing we found required a redesign. Every one of these ten sites could fix its worst offenders with a few days of focused developer time: writing real alt text for the top-selling SKUs first, swapping swatch divs for actual button or radio elements with the right ARIA states, and running a contrast check across the filter panel. None of it needed a new visual system or a slower checkout.
That's the actual takeaway here. None of ten major storefronts passed a full review, and none of them needed to fail. If you want to know exactly where your own storefront lands on this same checklist, you can get a free audit of your own storefront and see the real list before a customer, or a regulator, finds it for you.