Accessibility Watch › Data Study
Cigar Retailers Online Accessibility: We Tested 7 Sites Against WCAG 2.1 AA
Web accessibility is a legal requirement — under the ADA in the U.S. and the European Accessibility Act in the EU. We ran an automated WCAG 2.1 Level AA scan on 7 cigar retailers online to see how the group measures up.
How many cigar retailers online pass accessibility checks?
43% failed the automated checks (grade C, D, or F). Of 7 sites scanned: 4 scored an A, 1 graded C, 2 graded D, and 0 graded F.
Grades reflect the high-frequency barriers automated scanners most often flag — so an A means a site is clean on those, not that it has zero issues of any kind. Across the full set of WCAG 2.1 AA checks, sites averaged 2.9 types of barrier.
The most common accessibility failures
| Barrier | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Ensure is not used for delayed refresh | 43% |
| Some content on the page isn’t inside a recognized region (header, nav, main, footer, aside). | 43% |
| Some form fields have no label that screen readers can announce. | 29% |
| Some buttons or links are too small to tap reliably on touch screens. | 29% |
| Ensure role attribute has an appropriate value for the element | 14% |
| Ensure aria-hidden elements are not focusable nor contain focusable elements | 14% |
| Some text on this page is too light to read against its background. | 14% |
| An iframe (embedded content) has no title. | 14% |
| Some links have no readable text — usually icon-only links. | 14% |
| Ensure | 14% |
The most accessible cigar retailers online
These scored an A — clean on the high-frequency barriers we grade:
- cigar.com
- thompsoncigar.com
- mikescigars.com
- cigarsinternational.com
Methodology
We scanned each site with axe-core 4.11.4 against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, in its default state, and reported automatically-detectable failures. Automated testing catches a portion of accessibility barriers; full conformance also requires manual and assistive-technology testing. See our methodology for details.
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