I work for a large grocery chain in the Netherlands. We do ecommerce on a national scale: facilitating the ordering and delivery of groceries in the Netherlands. With a large organisation, it any change is not without effort and extensive investment.

During 2021, an investigation conducted by level-level.com signalled that they were only able to complete 55% of steps from their use case using keyboard and/or screen reader. This meant they were unable to place an order!

Everybody involved in software engineering knows that accessibility (or A11y) matters. And while we all agree that it's a good thing, we don't always prioritise it. I think we're long overdue in doing a better job. Or even better, consider it an intrinsic part of our basics.

A11y means the way that your product is, quite literally, accessible by any user. We can capture a11y in numbers, that beautifully translate into contrast ratios, tab orders, the amount of ARIA labels and whatnot. The most important thing to realise though is, that you should be aware that other users have other needs and maybe limitations that you should take into account.