# The customers who leave without telling you > Most shoppers who can't use a store leave without a word, and many shop elsewhere from then on. Where they get stuck on a Shopify store, and how to find it. **Provider:** SiteRemora (https://siteremora.com) **URL:** https://siteremora.com/blog/customers-who-leave-without-telling-you **Published:** 2026-11-02 ## A sale that looks like a bounce A shopper lands on a product page from a search ad. She uses a screen reader. She hears the product name and the price, then a row of buttons that each say "button". She can't tell which one is the medium, so she guesses. She presses add to cart and hears silence. She presses it again. After a minute she goes back to the search results and buys the same thing from the next store on the list. In your analytics that's one session, two add to cart events and an abandoned cart. It looks like someone who changed her mind. ## Most of them don't write in The shoppers this happens to rarely tell the store. In WebAIM's 2024 survey of 1,539 screen reader users, 67% said they never or rarely contact a website owner about a barrier.[^webaim-sr10] The UK's Click-Away Pound survey asked disabled shoppers what they do when a site is hard to use. 69% said they leave, and 8% said they get in touch with the business.[^clickaway-2019] So the usual signals stay quiet. Support tickets don't mention it, and neither do reviews. For many stores, the first time anyone describes the problem in writing is [a demand letter](/blog/shopify-accessibility-demand-letter), and it lists the same barriers the shopper ran into. ## And many shop somewhere else from then on Losing one order would be bad enough. The same survey found that 83% of shoppers with access needs limit their shopping to sites they already know are accessible, and 86% had paid more for something on an accessible site rather than buy it for less on one that was harder to use.[^clickaway-2019] Once a shopper finds a store that works, she goes back to it. The store she left loses the next order too. The Click-Away Pound survey is British and dates from 2019, and we'd like newer American numbers. More than one in four U.S. adults has some kind of disability, by the CDC's count,[^cdc-disability] and only some of them use the web differently. Still, every store of any size has some of these customers, whether it can see them in its reports or not. ## Where they get stuck on a Shopify store When WebAIM asked screen reader users what gives them the most trouble, menus, tabs and dialogs that don't behave as expected came second, after CAPTCHAs. Links and buttons that don't make sense came third, then parts of the screen that change without warning.[^webaim-sr10] On a Shopify store, that's the menu, the variant picker, the cart drawer and the pop-ups. - **Size and color buttons** with no name, or no way to tell which one is selected. - **Add to cart** that updates the counter in the header and says nothing to a screen reader. - **The cart drawer** sliding open while keyboard focus stays on the product page behind it. - **A discount pop-up** that covers the page and won't close from the keyboard. - **Product photos** read out as file names, so the black jacket and the navy one sound the same. - **Search suggestions** that appear and disappear without a word. Each of these comes from the theme or an app, and each is easy to miss when you shop with a mouse. They're also what [ADA complaints against online stores](/blog/what-ada-complaints-say-is-broken) name most often. ## Try buying something yourself You can find most of this in fifteen minutes. Put the mouse aside and use Tab, Enter, Space and the arrow keys. Open the menu, go to a collection, pick a product, choose a size and add it to the cart. Open the cart and get to checkout. If you lose track of where you are, or a control won't respond, a keyboard user is stuck in the same place. Then do it again with the screen reader your computer already has, VoiceOver on a Mac or Narrator on Windows. Listen for three things. Does each button say what it does? Does the size you picked say it's selected? When you add to cart, do you hear anything? [Our checklist](/blog/shopify-accessibility-checklist) has the rest of the list. Run the same pass after every theme update and app install, because [stores drift](/blog/accessibility-drift-shopify) a little with each one. ## Count them as customers It's easy to file accessibility under legal costs. The people in these surveys aren't a compliance category. They wanted the jacket, had a card in hand, and couldn't finish. [The owners we work with care about them](/blog/caring-about-accessibility-is-the-easy-part). The trouble is that from the Shopify admin, a shopper who couldn't check out looks the same as one who didn't want to. SiteRemora walks part of the shopping path on every scan, choosing an option, adding to cart and typing into search, and fixes what a screen reader can't hear in your theme. The shopper who pressed add to cart twice won't send you an email. Make sure she hears the first press.