Low Web Accessibility Score

[sungduk]

Hello, I have created a website through Square Online. After launching the website, and running the accessibility scan through Google Lighthouse and aXe (Web Accessibility Scanning tools), the web accessibility score turned out to be low compared to other websites. I tried to make a fix that was suggested by those tools (ex. adding title to iframe, adding aria-label to button HTML elements, etc), but  I couldn't apply those fixes due to the limited functionalities from Square Online Edit Site.

How can I ensure good web accessibility for my website in this case? I tried following this article - https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7131-web-accessibility-information but they were not very helpful.

[JJ_]

Hello there @sungduk

At this time, the Square Online team is working hard on improving the accessibility offering of Square Online. I don't have any updates or dates to give you but rest assured that while this isn't possible at this time, this is on their radar. 

I hope this information is helpful! 

[sungduk]

Hi @JJ_ ,

Thank you for your reply. The reason I wanted to bring this up is because I am worried about the accessibility lawsuit. What can Square do if we ever get into such lawsuit because Square couldn’t provide accessibility features for the website?

[sungduk]

Hello @JJ_ ,

Following up on this topic, I ran Google Lighthouse and aXe today and noticed web accessibility of my website have significantly improved! Thank you so much for your effort.

However, Google Lighthouse still reports 86 as an accessibility score (Better than before, but still not quite fully compliant), and aXe tool reported 1 critical & 7 serious issues with web accessibility.

Is the team still working on making websites fully compliant with web accessibility?

Thank you!

[JJ_]

Hey there @sungduk

Yes, the team is always looking to improve the functionality of Square Online and that includes accessibility. In regards to updates or details, I am unable to share those but hopefully, they come sooner rather than later.

[sungduk]

Here are a couple of warnings I got if it helps the team:

<frame> or <iframe> elements do not have a title

Links do not have a discernible name

Heading elements are not in a sequentially-descending order

[user-scalable="no"] is used in the <meta name="viewport"> element or the [maximum-scale] attribute is less than 5.

[sungduk]

Hi @JJ_ , following up on this topic as my website still produces a score of 86 from the Lighthouse Report. Let me know if I can provide any help, or take action to bring the score up to > 90. Thank you.

[JJ_]

The Square Online team continues to work on improving site performance every day.  However, I would like to share my personal experience with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) types of websites. And that is Google will always find something negative about them as the elements built on them are One Size Fits all versus Custom Built websites that you or your web developer would own the code one hundred percent. 

I will make sure to post here if I hear any significant updates regarding this topic @sungduk.

[sungduk]

Hi @JJ_ , okay I need to come back to this topic because we did actually experience a lawsuit with our previous website (hosted by another company) and recently read this article - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html

I recently checked our website's ADA compliant score, and our website has been consistently scored low from multiple ADA compliant check websites. For example, https://accessibe.com/accessscan?website=https://www.tummystuffer101.com/&gclid=Cj0KCQiA3uGqBhDdARIs...

I'm not sure if those ADA compliant check websites are legit, but we see that other major companies websites have been scored as "high" or "compliant".

Could you please escalate this to the engineering team to make websites ADA compliant, so we don't have to worry about any lawsuit coming in our way?

[JJ_]

Good question @sunduk. At this time I cannot provide any legal advice and don't have an answer for you. I recommend asking a legal advisor how to best approach a situation like this one.