Is your game store’s website accessible? If not, you’ve got a problem.
I’ve been digging into the accessibility issue for the past several months with the rise of game store owners finding themselves targets of lawsuits in the US, trying to find a good solution to the problem.
I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that the easiest options on the market, things like Accessibe and UserWay, only get you to about 30% of the way there.
They also come with other issues that complicate things. Check out my interview with Erik Bigglestone to find out more about his experience with them, but the short version is that alt tags for graphics are a big factor in how accessible your website is rated, and those overlay widgets are supposed to fix that by looking at the images on your site and using AI to interpret them and filling in the alt text for that image.
The big sticking point is that some of the most common ecommerce platforms fill in the alt text for images with the name of the image by default. Overlay widgets skip those because to them the image has the necessary alt text.
This means that for stores that have thousands of SKUs and product pages, and therefore thousands of product images, you could install the widget and have it scan your site, say that everything is 100% perfect, and still have thousands of potential accessibility violations without even knowing it!
For some of those platforms, the structure is so fixed that without investing in serious web development help there isn’t even a way around this.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick fix solution that’s guaranteed to make your website compliant. I’ve also heard some horror stories about the support you receive in the event you do get served, so there’s that as well.
So that’s the bad news.
Using Google Lighthouse On Your Website
The good news is that there are still options for getting your website compliant, protect your business from painful lawsuits, and without spending five digits on getting it done.
We decided to add accessibility remediation as part of our services in the Manaverse Marketing Agency and make it easier for game stores to protect themselves. Using a hands on approach and diving into the code of a client’s ecommerce website, we were able go from an Accessibility score in the mid-80’s to a 98.
You (or someone on your team who’s technically adept) can use Google Lighthouse to find out where your current website stands and then use it to find the issues in the code. Once you know where the problems are you can dig into the code and make the necessary changes.
It takes some time, testing, and back and forth, but it’s certainly possible.
The first step is to download Google Lighthouse for your browser and running a report for your website.
Once you’ve got the browser extension installed, navigate to your website, click the extension and run the report.
Once you’ve got your report, you can work your way down the list correcting each of the issues until your website is unassailable from an accessibility perspective. A bonus with Google Lighthouse is that it will also show you a bunch of different ways you can improve the experience of your website for your customers, which can make a huge difference in sales.
Of course, if you want some help making your website more accessible you can reach out to us anytime!
Book a free call right here and we’ll put together a plan for making your website accessible while also growing your game store with a cutting edge digital marketing strategy.