Before/After: Accessibility-first checkout redesign recovered 9% of abandoned carts

Design · 5 min read

Problem and audit: ModeHaus, a mid-size apparel retailer, had 11.4% cart abandonment in checkout and mounting complaints from customer-support tickets about keyboard navigation and confusing error states. An accessibility audit found low color contrast, unlabeled form controls, missing ARIA live regions for error messages, and a performance-heavy confirmation modal that interfered with screen readers.

Redesign choices: The product and design teams prioritized text contrast, added semantic HTML and ARIA attributes, simplified the checkout to a single-column responsive layout, and implemented inline error messaging with ARIA live regions. They replaced a JavaScript-heavy confirmation modal with a progressive, server-validated confirmation screen that maintained focus order and added explicit success/undo controls. The team also optimized asset loading for the checkout page to reduce Time to Interactive (TTI) on low-end devices.

Results and reflections: After deploying the redesign, ModeHaus saw a 9% recovery in previously abandoned carts, a 27% drop in accessibility-related support tickets, and a measurable improvement in keyboard-only task completion in lab tests. The team underscored that accessibility improvements also simplified cognitive load for all users and that focusing on performance alongside semantics was critical to ensure assistive tech behaved reliably.