Should gift wrap price be in the checkbox label?

Yes, or immediately next to it in text. A buyer should not have to select an extra to discover its cost in the total, and screen reader users in particular need the price associated with the control itself.

How should a gift message character limit work?

State the limit in the field's description before typing, provide a count that can be checked on demand, and announce when the limit is reached. Never silently stop accepting characters with no explanation.

What belongs on the review step for gifts?

The wrapping choice, the full message text, and its cost inside the total. If any of those is missing at review, the buyer has no accessible way to verify a paid extra before paying for it.

Are per item gift options harder to make accessible?

They need more care, not different principles. Group each item's options under that item's name, label every control in context, and make the total wrapping cost readable as text before checkout.

Accessible Virtual Try-On and AR Fit Tools: The Fallback Is the Feature

October 31, 2026

Try-on and AR tools are visual by nature, which is exactly why their text fallback decides whether they exclude people. What an accessible try-on flow needs besides a camera.

Virtual try-on asks a shopper to point a camera at their face, hand, or room and watch a product appear on it. For a blind shopper, a shopper with a motor impairment who cannot hold a phone steady at the required angle, or anyone whose device is too old to run it, that interaction is not difficult. It is absent. The question is what the store offers instead, and whether that instead is any good.

WCAG does not ban visual tools. It does expect the information they deliver to be available another way. A try-on tool delivers real information: how a shade reads against skin, how a frame size sits, how a sofa fits a wall. If that judgement is only available through the camera, a class of shoppers is making the purchase with less information than everyone else, on the stores most considered products.

What the fallback has to carry

A good fallback is not a sentence saying the tool is unavailable. It carries the decision the tool was helping with. For shades, that means undertone guidance, swatches on a range of skin tones described in text, and undertone matched recommendations. For frames, measurements in millimetres with a guide to measuring an existing pair. For furniture, dimensions, clearances, and a printable or list based way to check a space.

Measurements are the honest core of most fit decisions, and they are fully available in text. Face width against frame width, ring size against a sizing chart that is a real table, room dimensions against product dimensions. Stores that publish those numbers properly often find the fallback serves a lot of sighted shoppers too, including everyone on a train who was never going to wave a phone around in public.

The tool itself still has obligations

Where the tool can be operated, its controls need the usual discipline: labelled buttons, instructions in text before the camera opens, no step that depends on a gesture alone, and a way out that does not lose the product selection. Camera permission prompts are a known abandonment point. Explain, in the page and before the system prompt, why the camera is needed and what happens to the images, because a shopper who declines permission needs the fallback offered immediately, not a dead end.

Movement based steps need alternatives. Hold your phone at arms length and turn slowly is an instruction some shoppers cannot follow. A still photo upload route, where the store offers one, covers many of them, provided the upload itself is labelled, keyboard operable, and tells the shopper how their photo is used and retained.

Test it with the camera off

The fastest honest test of a try-on page is to deny camera permission and see what is left. If what is left would let you choose a shade, a size, or a frame with confidence, the page works. If what is left is a blank panel and a support link, the store has built a feature for some shoppers and a wall for others, on the same URL.

Put that test in the release check for any fit tool, and repeat it when the vendor updates the tool, because vendors change fallbacks as casually as they change buttons. Your product page, your conversion rate, and your problem, once the tool is embedded in them.

Frequently asked questions

Does WCAG ban virtual try-on tools?

No. It expects the information a tool provides to be available in another way. A try-on tool conveys shade, fit, and scale information, so a text based fallback carrying measurements and guidance is what makes the page accessible.

What should a try-on fallback include?

The decision data behind the tool: dimensions in numbers, sizing tables in real table markup, undertone and swatch guidance described in text, and a way to check fit without a camera.

What if a shopper declines camera permission?

Offer the fallback immediately, on the same page, without losing their product selection. Explaining before the prompt why the camera is needed, and what happens to images, also reduces refusals driven by uncertainty.

How should we test a try-on tool for accessibility?

Use it with the camera denied, with a keyboard alone, and with a screen reader. If a confident choice is possible in all three, the page is in good shape.