Rihanna sued, again, for website accessibility
Rihanna’s beauty company, Fenty Beauty, was sued last week by a blind woman, Beatriz Gutierrez, who alleges that the website is inoperable with a screen reader and therefore she is unable to interact with the website or make purchases.
She is requesting an injection against Fenty Beauty to make their website accessible and she is requesting damages of $15,000.
What does all of this mean?
We did a quick analysis of the website to get a better understanding of the barriers. A few things we noticed immediately were:
- Images do not have descriptions
- Since screen readers are unable, at present, to identify images, they rely on an alt-tag. This is a feature that allows website authors to add a description to images so screen readers can perceive and announce the type of product in an image.
- In this case, we looked at a few products without a screen reader (NVDA) and they were skipped.
- Pop-up offers not read.
- The website presents a pop-up with an offer for free shipping. This was not announced by a screen reader so visually-impaired users will have difficulty finding this offer.
Conclusion
A quick scan revealed that product images and promotions were missed. It’s understandable how a visually-impaired user may not be able to find a product, add it to the cart or hear a promotion based on the current state of the website.
See the screen reader course to understand how to make your website accessible to this type of technology.