Case study
The Shop That Couldn't Be Shopped by Keyboard
What a free scan found vs. what manual testing found
The business: a UK independent retailer selling women's fashion and homeware online, a fairly typical setup with a multi-level category structure, filterable product listings, customer reviews, and an email capture popup.
What we tested: homepage, a category listing page, a product page, the cart, and checkout. We ran an automated scan first, the same free type of check anyone can run in seconds, then followed it with manual testing: keyboard-only navigation and NVDA, a free screen reader commonly used for UK compliance testing.
The scan found real issues. Manual testing found that two of the site's core shopping functions don't work at all without a mouse.
Step one
What a scanner found in seconds
- Critical (1): an image missing alt text, so a screen reader can't convey what it shows.
- Serious (2): links with no announceable text, leaving their purpose unclear (6 instances), and text with insufficient contrast against its background (3 instances).
- Moderate (2): content sitting outside any landmark region (7 instances), and a page missing a level-one heading.
- Minor (1): alt text duplicating visible text (4 instances).
This is a more substantive list than we often see, and all of it is worth fixing. Six links with no announceable text is a genuine navigation problem. Missing landmarks and a missing H1 make it harder for a screen reader user to orient themselves on a page.
But every issue on this list is a problem of description, things being unlabelled, unclear, or hard to read.
None of it tells you whether the site can actually be operated.
Step two
What only manual testing found
Testing by hand, tabbing through every interactive element and listening with NVDA, surfaced eight further issues, including two that break core shopping functions outright.
Headline finding 1: you can't browse by subcategory without a mouse
The main navigation uses dropdown menus. Hovering a top-level category with a mouse reveals its subcategories, the normal way a customer narrows down from "Homeware" to what they actually want.
By keyboard, the dropdowns don't open at all. Tabbing to a top-level category and pressing Enter or Space navigates straight to the parent category page instead. The dropdown never appears, which means every subcategory on the site is unreachable by keyboard. A keyboard-only user can reach the top-level pages and nothing beneath them. The site's entire navigation structure below the first level is, for them, missing.
This didn't appear in the scan at any severity. Automated tools check whether a menu has appropriate roles and labels in the markup; they don't press Enter on it and check whether it opened. The markup here is adequate. The behaviour isn't.
Headline finding 2: the price filter cannot be used at all
Category pages include a price range slider, the standard way to narrow a large product list to what you can afford.
It cannot be operated by keyboard. Arrow keys do nothing. And NVDA announces it only as "clickable," with no indication of what it is, what its current values are, or what pressing anything would do. A screen reader user encounters an unlabelled clickable thing that doesn't respond; a keyboard-only user can focus it and then has no way to move it.
Filtering by price isn't a nice-to-have on a fashion and homeware site with a wide price spread, it's how most people shop. This is the second core function of the site that only works with a mouse, and again the scan flagged nothing.
A third finding worth its own mention: prices are never announced
While testing product listings, NVDA never announced product prices anywhere. The prices are on screen and visible; they simply aren't conveyed to a screen reader.
Combined with the broken price filter, the effect compounds badly: a screen reader user can't filter by price, and can't hear prices either. They can browse products, but they cannot find out what any of them cost.
That is a category page that has stopped functioning as a shop.
Everything else we found by hand
- A 10%-off discount popup that isn't reachable by Tab until you've tabbed through the entire page first, with focus never moved into it when it opens, interrupting keyboard users with something they can't immediately dismiss or use.
- The popup's Subscribe button has no visible focus indicator, and neither does the "Write a review" button or an adjacent filter icon button, despite all being reachable by Tab.
- Category images and their accompanying text links point to the same destination as separate links, so NVDA announces every category twice in a row, doubling the length of the listing for no benefit.
We also found a star rating widget that NVDA announces as interactive, variously as a widget, an icon, or a graphical button depending on how it's reached, but which does nothing when activated. This is a pattern we've now seen on more than one audit: a display element that's been given interactive semantics somewhere in the code, so assistive technology promises the user a control that isn't there. It's a small issue, but it wastes the user's time and undermines their confidence that anything else on the page will behave as announced.
The takeaway
What this means for a real client
The automated scan did its job. It found an image with no alt text, six unlabelled links, three contrast failures, missing landmarks and a missing H1, all real, all worth fixing, and all things a merchant can act on quickly.
What it could not find is that this site's navigation and its price filter don't work without a mouse. That's not a limitation anyone should hold against the scanner. A scanner reads code: is there a label, a role, a heading, enough contrast. It cannot tab to a dropdown and check whether it opened. It cannot press arrow keys on a slider and notice nothing moves. It cannot listen to a product listing and notice the prices are missing. Those checks require someone actually operating the site the way a disabled customer would.
For a business in this retailer's position, the practical consequence is straightforward: a keyboard-only or screen reader customer arriving on this site can reach top-level categories, can't get to subcategories, can't filter by price, and can't find out what anything costs. They aren't experiencing a degraded version of the shop, for the purposes of actually buying something, they've hit a wall. Every one of those barriers is also exactly the kind of specific, documentable failure that EAA and Equality Act complaints are built from.
And none of it is visible on screen. The dropdowns work. The slider slides. The prices are right there. Nothing looks broken, which is precisely why these issues survive indefinitely until someone tests for them properly.
This is why we run both on every audit, the scan for breadth and speed, the manual pass for the failures that actually stop a sale.
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Curious what we'd find on yours?
Start with a free automated scan to see the obvious issues first, or get in touch about a full manual audit of your checkout and login flows.