July 21, 2026
87% of Disabled Shoppers Can’t Complete a Purchase Alone, Study Says on European Accessibility Act Compliance
Nexer Digital has published new research on how disabled shoppers actually get on with retail websites, and the numbers are striking. 87% of disabled consumers say they can’t get through a typical shopping journey, from browsing to after-sales support, without help from someone else, a workaround, or giving up. The data is telling about how European Accessibility Act (EAA) compliance has struggled a year on from when it became applicable.
The report, called The Hidden Journey, coincides with Disability Pride Month and the first anniversary of the EAA. The EAA’s technical benchmark, EN 301 549, currently incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That’s the standard most e-commerce platforms are being measured against.
The design agency surveyed disabled consumers in the UK, ran in-depth interviews, and audited a batch of retail, banking, and travel websites. The picture that develops is one of friction stacking up at every stage. Sixty-two percent hit inaccessible content while browsing. Issues included missing alt text and poor contrast. Fifty-five percent said navigation was confusing or pop-ups got in the way. By checkout, 81% were struggling, often because of CAPTCHA or ID verification steps that don’t work with screen readers or other assistive tools. Only 13% made it through the whole journey unaided and without difficulty.
What People Actually Do About It
Hardly anyone tells retailers when this happens. Just 9% of people who hit a barrier contacted customer support. Only 4% filed a formal complaint. Instead, they cope. Forty-five percent asked a friend or family member for help while browsing. Twenty-six percent just switched to a different site. At checkout, 43% got someone else to finish the transaction for them, and 38% abandoned the purchase entirely.
Nexer Digital’s Managing Director, Hilary Stephenson, commented:
“When accessibility is overlooked, customers do not complain, they leave. And when they leave, they often do not come back.”
A retailer watching conversion rates and support tickets usually see none of this. The customers who are struggling most are precisely the ones least likely to show up in the data a CX team normally relies on.
The report isn’t only a list of failures, however. It illustrates a handful of retailers doing this well. M&S’s ostomy underwear range, built with input from Colostomy UK, for example. Primark’s adaptive clothing line, which uses NaviLens codes for in-store navigation, is another. There are Tesco’s zoomed-in self-checkout screens, developed with the RNIB, and Auto Trader, which has run usability testing on its car-buying tools with people using screen readers and voice control.
Further Takeaways Behind the European Accessibility Act Data
What’s less discussed, but arguably more interesting for anyone in financial services, is what happens when the task itself is sensitive. Only a third of respondents reported barriers in banking, against 65% in retail. However, the interviews suggest the barriers that do exist matter more there. Handing your card details or account login to a relative because a verification step won’t work is a privacy problem as well as a chronic inconvenience. It’s also arguably a data-handling issue too, whatever the customer’s intentions were in sharing it.
There’s a commercial upside sitting right next to the bad news, and it’s a big one. Ninety-eight percent of disabled customers say they’re more likely to buy again from a brand that gets accessibility right. Eighty-one per cent would recommend it.
Purple Tuesday founder Mike Adams tied this back to what he calls the Purple Pound, the combined spending power of disabled people and their households, arguing businesses:
“…don’t understand the power of the Purple Pound and the straightforward solutions that can be put in place to unlock the disability market.”
What the Compliance and CX Data Means if You’re the One Buying the Platform
None of this requires a retailer to start from scratch. The EAA’s applicability date has already passed, so anyone selling into the EU should already have checked whether their platforms meet WCAG 2.1 AA, rather than treating it as a future deadline. In the UK, the EAA doesn’t apply directly. The Equality Act’s reasonable adjustments duty covers similar ground. Any UK retailer trading into the EU is caught by the EAA regardless.
For anyone buying or renewing an e-commerce, CCaaS or self-service platform this year, a viable move is to ask vendors for a current accessibility conformance report rather than taking a badge on their website at face value. They can test flows like checkout and verification with actual assistive tech, not just an automated scanner. Automated tools are good at catching missing alt text. They’re much worse at catching the kind of checkout dead-end that made 38% of this survey’s respondents give up.
However, arguably the most alarming number isn’t the 87%. It’s the 4% who bothered to report a problem. Every metric CX teams lean on, whether NPS, CSAT, or complaint volumes, assumes people will tell you when something’s broken. This report is a salient reminder that plenty of customers won’t. They’ll just stop showing up.
