Playbook, fashion retailer
Ecru, oatmeal and stone describe nothing on their own
The information that decides a clothing purchase is unusually visual even by retail standards. Colour is carried by a small square of image and named with a word that means nothing on its own. Weight and drape are demonstrated by putting the piece on a moving model. Neither of those is text, which means a shopper using a screen reader and an assistant reading documents hit exactly the same wall, and one piece of writing gets both of them past it.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for accessibility requests holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Colour here is published as a swatch and a photograph, and the name attached to it does no work: nothing in the word oatmeal separates a warm cream from a grey beige, and the shopper who cannot see the square has no route to the answer.
- Weight, drape and stretch are shown rather than stated, usually by a video of somebody walking, so the properties most likely to decide a purchase exist only as moving pictures and appear in no document at all.
- A large share of these requests are product questions wearing the clothes of site questions: whether a fastening is magnetic, whether a piece opens at the side, whether it can be put on while seated, and those are answered from a specification rather than from a help page.
- Not being able to read the size chart is a blocker rather than an inconvenience in this trade, because size is the only decision on the page and everything else there is a photograph of it.
How it arrives
- what colour is oatmeal actually
- does this fasten with buttons or a zip
- can this be put on sitting down
- is there a written description of how it hangs
- do you sell anything with magnetic fastenings
- is the fabric see through in a pale colour
What has to be indexed for this to work
| A colour description in words beside every swatch | Warm or cool, light or mid, what it sits next to. Two clauses per colourway. It is the cheapest accessibility work available in this trade and it also answers the highest volume question the assistant currently cannot touch. |
|---|---|
| Garment properties written out rather than demonstrated | Weight, drape, stretch and in which direction, whether it is lined, whether it is opaque in pale colours. All of this is currently carried by a video, and none of it is available to anything that reads. |
| Fastening and construction detail per line | How the piece opens, what the closure is, whether there is an alternative fastening on any line you carry. This is what an adaptive dressing question actually needs, and it is a specification rather than a policy. |
| Where an accessibility report goes, with a person behind it | Separate from general support. These need a reply from somebody who can commit to a change, and they do not survive being answered in the same queue as a delivery query. |
The reply
Colour is published as a swatch image on the product pages, so I cannot describe one from the picture, but the written colour notes on our fabric and colour page cover every colourway and I can read any of them out [1]. For this piece the note says a warm off white with a yellow cast rather than a grey one. On the fastening, this line closes with a concealed zip at the left side seam and there are no buttons on it [2]. If it is drape you are after, that is currently only shown in the video on the page, which I cannot read, so tell me which piece and I will pass it on as a request for a written description. And if something on the site itself is blocking you, that is worth reporting rather than working around.
It admits what it cannot see and immediately points at the material that covers it, so the visitor gets an answer rather than an apology. The colour note is quoted rather than paraphrased, because a paraphrase of a colour is an invention. The gap in the material is named openly and turned into a request, which is more useful than a refusal and gives the shop the list of what to write next.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor needs a property the material does not carry, cannot complete a step on the site, or is reporting the accessibility of the shop itself.
That should reach somebody who can actually change it rather than stopping with me. Leave your name, an email and what you ran into, including the piece or the page, and it goes to the team who handle this. If you want to order in the meantime, say what you are after and I will pass that at the same time.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never describe a colour, a texture or a drape from a photograph, since the assistant reads text and any description it produced would be invented.
- Never claim the site is accessible or meets a standard unless the indexed material states exactly that, because the person asking is in a position to check.
- Never say a garment can be managed one handed, put on seated or dressed without help, all of which depend on the person rather than on the specification.
- Never suggest asking somebody else to help with the site, which is the reflex here and reads as being told to go away.
Questions
- Can it read the colour out of a swatch image?
- No. An image is invisible to it in exactly the way it is to a screen reader, which is the useful symmetry here: the two clauses that make a colourway answerable for a customer make it answerable for the assistant, and neither happens without the writing.
- Where should a shop start if it does one thing?
- Two clauses of colour description per colourway. It is an afternoon of work across a season, it removes the most common blocker for shoppers who cannot see the swatch, and it unlocks a question the assistant otherwise has to refuse several times a day.
- Should it answer adaptive dressing questions?
- It should answer the specification and stop there. What the fastening is, where it sits, whether the line has an alternative. Whether a particular person can manage it is not a fact about the garment, and an assistant that guesses at it is guessing about somebody's body.
Keep reading
- Everything for a fashion retailerFit is both the most asked pre-purchase question and the biggest cause of returns. Here is what a clothing retailer can safely automate.
- Handling accessibility requests in generalTwo different things arrive as one message. A published accessibility statement answers the first. The second is a request, and it needs a person.
- A saved size profile is not the same kind of data as a postcodeSaved measurements are body data and do not feel like an address. Deleting the history also deletes the proof behind a later claim.
- The argument is about whether they wore itAn inspection call about perfume, makeup or wear reads as an accusation. Shrinkage arguments have two sides and no document settles them.
- The clock keeps running while they cannot get inThe returns portal sits behind the login and the clock does not pause. Here being unable to sign in genuinely stops something.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.