Back-to-school spending is set to break records this year. The National Retail Federation (NRF) reports the season is on track to hit $146.8 billion in 2026, an all-time high and the second-largest U.S. consumer spending event of the year behind the winter holidays. Online shopping is the most popular channel, ahead of department stores, discount stores, and clothing stores.
Retailers are fighting for that business in a different place this year. Artificial intelligence search tools skip the front door, so the homepage is no longer where customers land. Someone searching for "best back-to-school laptop deals" gets dropped onto a product page, a spec comparison, or an electronics category page, which is where the buying decision gets made. Fewer shoppers are typing a retailer's name into a browser at all.
Adobe tracked a 3,300% year-over-year jump in generative AI traffic to U.S. retail sites during Amazon's Prime Day in 2025. Deloitte found that families shopping with search engines, social media, and AI tools plan to spend nearly double what other shoppers do this season. Those pages carry about 10% more accessibility issues than homepages, according to AudioEye's 2026 Digital Accessibility Index. Most accessibility programs were built to protect the homepage.
AI search moved the entry point
Accessibility testing was built around one assumption: Most visitors start at the homepage. Test it, fix what you find, and you have covered the page nearly everyone lands on. That worked when people entered a site through the front page and clicked their way in. It does not work when a shopper asks an AI tool a question and lands on a product listing, a comparison table, or a checkout flow.
The Digital Accessibility Index scanned more than 160,000 pages across over 6,100 websites in the U.S. and Europe. Interior pages, the ones deeper inside a site, averaged 62 accessibility issues, while homepages averaged 56. For context, WebAIM's 2026 Million report, which scans only the homepages of the top million sites, found that 95.9% of those homepages have detectable failures against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard most accessibility laws point to. So nearly every homepage already has problems, but the pages shoppers actually land on have more of them.
From comparing tablet specs or filtering backpacks by color to checking whether a shoe comes in the right size and then paying: None of it happens on a homepage as back-to-school shopping lives deeper in.
And checkout is where the cost shows up. In conversations with members of AudioEye's A11iance Community, a group of people with disabilities who test and give feedback on real sites, checkout comes up again and again as the moment a shopping trip ends. One member put it plainly: "Ensure that the checkout and payment process is as well-built as the shopping process. It's horrible to spend a lot of time finding that perfect thing only to be unable to check out."
Legal exposure has followed the traffic
Interior pages were referenced in 64% of accessibility claims filed in 2025, according to the same Index. AudioEye's 2026 Accessibility Advantage Report found that 59% of business leaders say their organization would be at legal risk if audited today, and 52% have already faced an accessibility-related lawsuit or legal threat.
Having a tool installed is not the same as being covered. AudioEye's 2026 Web Accessibility Litigation Report found that 38.5% of companies sued over accessibility in 2025 already had an accessibility tool in place when the suit was filed.
Test in the order the traffic arrives
Most accessibility programs were built around a site map. The work now needs to follow the entry points. A few steps that change the order of operations:
- Pull the top 20 entry pages from analytics, including search and AI referrers, and test those first. Entry pages, not most-visited pages. The two lists are no longer the same.
- Test templates instead of individual URLs. Category, product detail, cart, and checkout templates account for most of a retail site's traffic, and a fix at the template level applies across thousands of pages at once.
- Run the full purchase path with a keyboard only, then again with a screen reader. Start on a product page and finish at an order confirmation. Testing the product page on its own misses the step that actually costs the sale.
- Start with the issues that turn up most often. The Index found the most common ones are missing image descriptions, unclear link text, unlabeled buttons and form fields, low contrast on interactive elements, and no way to skip past navigation.
- Keep testing after launch. Seasonal pages, promotional templates, and limited-time landing pages are built quickly and updated often, so a single check before the season opens does not hold through the season. A tool like an accessibility scanner can show where a specific page stands in a few minutes, which is enough to know whether a template needs real attention.
The pages that work win the business
Billions of dollars in spending are moving through web pages between now and the first week of school. A product page that a shopper can use with a keyboard, and a checkout that actually finishes, is a sale that closes instead of a cart that gets abandoned. The same holds for any business found this way, whether the landing page is a pricing page, an application form, or an account login.
Shoppers are on those pages right now, but the retailers with accessible sites are the ones making the sale.
This story was produced by AudioEye and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
