Potential pricing discrimination due to inaccessible web sites

Abstract

Although tools and design guidelines exist to make web sites accessible, a majority of web sites continue to be inaccessible. When a web site offers special prices that are available only on the web site (not the physical store), and the web site itself is inaccessible, this can lead to discriminatory pricing, where people with disabilities could end up paying higher prices than people without disabilities who can access the web site and take advantage of the online-only prices. This research examined whether 10 of the top e-commerce web sites which offer online-only price specials are accessible. The results revealed that there were multiple categories of accessibility violations found on all of the evaluated web sites. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.