How to Make Digital Catalogs Accessible for Every Shopper

Making a catalog accessible comes down to four things: real text instead of text baked into images, alt descriptions on every product image, keyboard navigation that works without a mouse, and colour contrast that holds up for readers with low vision. A catalog published as flat page images fails all four at once, which is why the format you publish matters more than any individual fix you apply afterwards. Structure first, then the details.

This is not a small audience. Roughly one in six people worldwide lives with some form of disability, and the numbers most relevant to catalog reading (vision impairment, colour blindness, motor limitations, dyslexia) are higher than most retailers assume. Add the situational cases, like someone reading on a phone in bright sunlight or with a broken wrist, and accessible design stops looking like a compliance chore and starts looking like basic usability.

Why Image Based Catalogs Fail Screen Readers

A screen reader works by reading the document’s underlying text and structure. If your catalog is a set of rendered page images, there is no underlying text, just a picture of one. The reader announces “image” and stops. Zoom does not help either, because enlarging a flattened image degrades it rather than reflowing the content, so a shopper who needs 200 percent magnification gets a blurry page and horizontal scrolling.

Text layers fix a lot of this. Publishing with the text preserved, or overlaying a proper text layer on top of the visual, gives assistive technology something to read while keeping the design intact. Product names, prices, descriptions, and specifications should all live in that layer, not only in the artwork.

Headings and reading order matter just as much. A catalog spread that looks obviously sequential to a sighted reader can be complete chaos in the DOM, jumping from a price on the right to a headline on the left to a footnote at the bottom. Testing the tab order once, with the mouse untouched, catches this faster than any automated scanner will.

Alt Text That Actually Helps Someone Buy

Alt text on a product image should describe what the product is and what distinguishes it, not repeat the caption sitting beside it. “Navy blue wool overcoat with notch lapels and horn buttons” is useful. “Product image” is not, and “coat coat winter coat buy coat” is keyword stuffing that makes the experience worse for the person it is meant to serve.

Aim for something in the range of 100 to 125 characters for a product image, which is roughly where screen readers handle it comfortably without truncation. Decorative images, borders, background textures, and lifestyle shots that add nothing informational should carry an empty alt attribute so the reader skips them rather than announcing noise.

Context changes what belongs in the description. On a furniture spread, dimensions and material matter. On fashion, colour, fit, and fabric. On electronics, the key specification. If the visual carries information the text does not (a size chart, an infographic, a comparison table rendered as an image) that content needs a full text equivalent somewhere, because a one line description cannot substitute for a table.

Contrast, Type Size, and Motion

WCAG sets the practical benchmark most retailers work to: a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, with AA being the level referenced in most legislation. Light grey price text on a white background is the single most common failure in retail design, and it is also the easiest to fix. Run your palette through a contrast checker before the design is signed off rather than after.

Type size and spacing deserve the same scrutiny. Body text below 16 pixels on mobile forces zooming, and tight line height makes long descriptions hard to track for readers with dyslexia. Avoid conveying meaning through colour alone, because a red “sale” price and a black regular price look identical to someone with the most common form of colour blindness unless the sale is also labelled in words.

Motion is the part people forget. Auto playing page flips, parallax effects, and animated transitions can trigger discomfort or nausea for readers with vestibular sensitivity, and they interfere with screen readers. Respecting the operating system’s reduced motion setting solves this with one CSS media query, and nobody who does not need it will ever notice.

Keyboard Navigation and Mobile Reality

Everything clickable has to be reachable by keyboard, in a logical order, with a visible focus indicator. That includes page turn controls, product hotspots, search, zoom, and any overlay or modal. Modals are the usual failure point: focus needs to move into them when they open, stay trapped inside while they are open, and return to where it was when they close. Publishing through tools that handle browsable online publications as proper web pages removes much of this work, because the focus and semantics come from HTML rather than from a custom viewer someone built around a PDF.

Touch targets are the mobile equivalent. A minimum of around 44 by 44 pixels gives someone with limited fine motor control a realistic chance of hitting a product hotspot, and small hotspots scattered across a dense spread are frustrating for everyone. Enough spacing between adjacent targets matters as much as the size of any one of them.

Then there is the download path. Offering the catalog as an accessible alternative format, a properly tagged PDF or a plain text product list, costs little and serves readers whose tools work better with a file than a web viewer. It also helps anyone on a slow connection, which in practice is a much larger group than the accessibility case alone.

What This Looks Like Across Different Retailers

A grocery flyer is short, changes weekly, and carries a lot of price information in small type. The accessibility priority here is contrast, price legibility, and making sure promotional conditions are readable text rather than tiny artwork. Because the file is republished constantly, whatever you build has to be part of the template rather than a manual pass each week.

Fashion and home catalogs are image heavy and lean on visual storytelling, so alt text and reduced motion carry the weight. The volume is the challenge: a 60 page seasonal publication might contain 400 images, and writing descriptions for all of them needs to be built into production rather than bolted on at the end. Pulling descriptions from the product feed automatically handles most of it, provided the feed data is good.

B2B and public sector catalogs face the sharpest requirement, because accessibility is often contractual. Suppliers bidding for government or institutional work are frequently asked for a conformance statement, and a catalog that cannot meet WCAG AA can disqualify a tender regardless of price. Retailers in this space tend to treat accessibility as a procurement asset rather than a cost.

If you are starting from an inaccessible catalog and wondering where to begin, run one spread through a screen reader yourself and try to buy something with the keyboard only. Fifteen minutes of that will tell you more than a compliance checklist, and it tends to change how the next catalog gets designed rather than just how the current one gets patched.

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