Accessibility Watch › Data Study
Online Women's Fashion Boutiques Accessibility: We Tested 5 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 5 online women’s fashion boutiques to see how the group measures up.
How many online women’s fashion boutiques pass accessibility checks?
60% failed the automated checks (grade C, D, or F). Of 5 sites scanned: 2 scored an A, 1 graded C, 1 graded D, and 1 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 3.6 types of barrier.
The most common accessibility failures
| Barrier | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Some links have no readable text — usually icon-only links. | 60% |
| Some content on the page isn’t inside a recognized region (header, nav, main, footer, aside). | 60% |
| Some text on this page is too light to read against its background. | 40% |
| Some buttons have no description that screen readers can announce. | 20% |
| A heading on this page has no text. | 20% |
| Heading levels skip — for example, an H2 jumps directly to an H4 with no H3 between them. | 20% |
| Some images on this page have no description for screen readers. | 20% |
| A dropdown menu has no description. | 20% |
| Ensure role attribute has an appropriate value for the element | 20% |
| A button’s visible text doesn’t match the description it announces to screen readers. | 20% |
The most accessible online women’s fashion boutiques
These scored an A — clean on the high-frequency barriers we grade:
- magnoliaboutique.com
- vestique.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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