We Scanned 32 Independent Small-Batch Food Shops for Accessibility — Here's What Failed

Key takeaways

• Average score 75/100 (median 76). 20 of 32 shops (63%) scored 80 or below.
• 18 of 32 shops (56%) had at least one link or button that a screen reader announces with no name, such as a search icon, a cart icon or a logo link.
• 22 of 32 shops (69%) had at least one element missing a name: a link, button, image or form field.
• Most fixes are one attribute. The average shop had 2.7 failing rules, not dozens.

How we ran this

We took independent online shops selling small-batch food and gift products: hot sauce and chilli jams, jams and preserves, honey, spice blends, fudge and toffee, and shortbread and biscuits. Most are UK-based. We ran each homepage through the AbleScan scanner (WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard the European Accessibility Act relies on) on 29 September 2026.

We picked the shops from search results before scanning. We left out marketplaces, franchises and large chains, and we kept every other shop that returned a score, whatever the score, so the sample is not filtered toward good or bad. We looked at 33 shops; 32 returned a usable score and 1 failed to scan.

The score starts at 100 and subtracts points for each failing rule, weighted by severity (critical, serious, moderate, minor) and by how many elements fail, with each rule's count capped so one repeated problem cannot zero a page.

Limits: homepages only, mostly one country, shops found through search (so skewed toward shops that are easy to find), a sample of 32, and automated testing catches only a portion of accessibility barriers. This is a snapshot, not a ranking, and we do not name individual shops.

The numbers

How food shops compare with other small-shop niches

These are three different hand-picked samples, so this compares snapshots and does not prove that one niche is better than another. Low-contrast text was the most common failure in all three.

The six most common failures

What is different about food shops

Food and gift shops lean on small utility icons: a search magnifier, a cart, an account icon, social logos and carousel arrows. In the 20 shops we then inspected element by element, these icons were the usual source of the missing-name failures. They are drawn as pictures, so a sighted visitor sees a cart, but a screen reader has nothing to read out.

That is good news: each is typically one attribute in a theme file, and the same icon component is often reused across the whole site, so a single change can clear a failure on every page at once.

The fix for each

1. Icon-only buttons with no name (critical)

A button that contains only an icon gives a screen reader nothing to announce. Add an accessible name.

<button type="submit" class="search-btn" aria-label="Search">
  <i class="fa fa-search"></i>
</button>
<button type="button" class="owl-prev" aria-label="Previous">…</button>

2. Links with no readable text

Logo links, cart and account icons, social icons and image-only collection links need a name. Name the link, or give the image inside it an alt (the alt then counts as the link's text).

<a href="/" aria-label="Your Shop Name – home">…logo image…</a>
<a href="/cart" aria-label="Cart">…</a>
<a href="https://www.instagram.com/yourshop" aria-label="Instagram">
  <i class="fa-brands fa-instagram"></i>
</a>

3. Images without alt text (critical)

Describe what the image shows. Purely decorative images can take an empty alt so screen readers skip them. Social-media logos need the name of the network.

<img src="hero.jpg" alt="Jars of small-batch chilli jam on a wooden table">
<img src="instagram.png" alt="Instagram">
<img src="divider.svg" alt="">

4. Form fields without a label (critical)

A newsletter email box that only has placeholder text is not labelled for a screen reader. Add a label or an aria-label.

<input type="email" name="contact[email]" aria-label="Email address">
<input type="number" name="quantity" value="1" aria-label="Quantity">

5. Low-contrast text

Text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background (3:1 for large text). Announcement bars, menu links, prices and small taglines were the usual offenders. A common near-miss is #777 on white, which is 4.48:1 and just fails; #767676 is the lightest grey that passes on white.

color: #767676;   /* passes 4.5:1 on a white background */

6. Sliders and nested controls

Slider dots and menu toggles that put a button inside another focusable control fail the "nested interactive" rule. Use one control per job: a real link plus a separate button for a sub-menu toggle. These usually live in your theme or a slider app, so check its settings or update it before editing markup by hand.

<a href="/collections/sauces">Sauces</a>
<button type="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Show Sauces menu">▾</button>

What this means under the EAA

The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 and follows the customer, not the company: if EU consumers can buy from you, you are expected to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, unless you are a micro-enterprise providing services. Many small-batch food makers are that small, so check the three tests in our micro-enterprise exemption guide. Penalties are set by each EU member state. Read who is covered in our EAA guide for online stores, and if you run Shopify, our Shopify accessibility checklist shows where each setting lives. Exempt or not, fixing these makes your shop easier to use for everyone, including customers on a phone in bright light.

See where your own shop stands

Paste your homepage into AbleScan and you get a plain-English list of exactly which of these issues your shop has, with the affected elements highlighted on a screenshot. It takes about 60 seconds and needs no signup.

FAQ