Accessibility

Shoppable video your whole audience can use

Storista's widgets and player are built to WCAG 2.2 level AA: every tile, arrow and control is reachable by keyboard, announced to screen readers, and respects a shopper's reduced-motion setting. Captions come with the plan.

Nothing to configure. Accessibility behaviour ships with the app on every plan, including Free.

Storista fullscreen player with captions switched on, showing labelled close, volume, captions, share, cart and next-video controls and a shoppable product card

Built in, not bolted on

Four things every shoppable-video surface should get right, and how Storista handles them.

Keyboard, end to end

Tab reaches every video tile, arrow, pagination bullet and add-to-cart button — one stop each, never a stop inside a stop. Enter or Space opens a video, Escape closes the player, and focus returns to the tile you came from.

Announced properly

Controls carry real names, not “button”: tiles are labelled with the post title, arrows say which direction they move, bullets report the slide they go to and which one is current. Decorative captions are hidden from screen readers so nothing is read twice.

Reduced motion honoured

When a shopper's system asks for reduced motion, auto-scrolling carousels and stories never start — the animation is not loaded at all, rather than started and stopped. Everyone else gets a pause control that stays paused until they resume it.

Targets you can hit

Close buttons, pause controls and pagination dots meet the 24× 24 px minimum target size, with a visible focus ring on every one of them.

Captions on every plan

Captions are the one accessibility requirement that depends on your content rather than our code, so we cover it two ways.

Free and Starter

Upload your own captions

Attach a caption track to any video you publish. The player shows a captions toggle wherever a track exists, so shoppers who need captions — or who are watching with the sound off — get the words.

Growth and Scale

Captions generated for you, in 60 languages

Captions are transcribed automatically with a best-in-class speech model, which recognises 60 languages — so a video spoken in any of them gets a caption track in that same language, without you writing a word. You can still upload your own track whenever you'd rather control the wording.

Captions are a WCAG 1.2.2 requirement for prerecorded video. A video with no track — uploaded or generated — will still be flagged by an automated audit, so it's worth turning them on.

Every widget, not just the main one

Accessibility work that only covers the flagship carousel leaves most of a store uncovered. Every surface Storista ships gets the same treatment — here's what that means in each one.

Carousel

One tab stop per tile with the post title as its name. Add-to-cart and the fullscreen product overlay are separate stops, never nested inside the tile.

Spotlight

Tile activation on the whole card, with the mute control kept outside it so the two never collide. Arrows are real buttons.

Stories and circles

Each circle is one labelled stop; the visible caption is hidden from screen readers so the name is announced once.

Video and carousel grids

Keyboard focus triggers the same preview that hover does, so keyboard users see what mouse users see. Load-more is a proper control.

Popup

The popup body and its close button are independent stops, and the close target meets the 24 px minimum.

Fullscreen player

Focus is trapped while the player is open, the rest of the page is hidden from assistive tech, and closing returns focus to where it started. Close, volume, previous and next are all labelled.

Audited, then re-audited

Accessibility claims are worth what their evidence is worth. Ours comes from an automated axe scan of every widget plus a manual keyboard and screen-reader pass, re-run on each release.

0

axe violations across all 9 widget types

Every widget is rendered from live store data and scanned against the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 A/AA rule sets plus axe's best-practice rules.

149

nodes checked for nested controls

The nested-interactive rule passes on all of them: no widget puts a focusable control inside another focusable control, which is the usual way video grids trap keyboard users.

36

rule groups passing document-wide

The whole-page scan reports zero violations, not just the widget markup in isolation.

The manual pass checks the things automation can't: that Tab moves tile to tile with a visible focus ring, that Enter opens the player and Escape closes it, that focus comes back where it left, and that a reduced-motion setting really stops the carousel moving rather than just hiding the animation.

What we don't claim

Where the line is

Colour contrast is yours to set

Widget text and control colours come from your own style settings, so a combination that fails the 4.5:1 contrast requirement is possible. Nothing in our code can guarantee it — pick colours that pass, and check them if accessibility is a compliance requirement for you.

Captions need a track to exist

The player shows captions wherever a track is present, and on Growth and Scale we generate one for you. A video with no track on Free or Starter has nothing to display, and an automated audit will flag it.

WCAG 2.2 AA is the target, not a certificate

We test against the 2.2 level AA criteria and publish what passes and what doesn't. That isn't the same as a third-party audit or a signed VPAT — if your procurement process needs one, talk to us about what we can share.

Your theme is part of the page

Storista is responsible for its own widgets and player. Heading order, landmarks, contrast and focus behaviour elsewhere on the page belong to your theme, and a store can fail an audit on those while every widget passes.

Accessibility questions

Which standard do you follow?

WCAG 2.2 level AA. We test the widgets and the fullscreen player against the 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 A and AA criteria, and we publish the criteria we don't fully meet rather than claiming blanket compliance.

Do I need to configure anything?

No. Keyboard support, screen-reader labels, focus management and reduced-motion handling ship with the app on every plan, including Free. The only accessibility setting you control is captions.

How do captions work on each plan?

On Free and Starter you can upload a caption track for any video. On Growth and Scale we transcribe captions automatically with a best-in-class speech model that recognises 60 languages, producing a track in the language the video is spoken in. You can still upload your own track instead.

Can shoppers use the widgets without a mouse?

Yes. Tab reaches every tile, arrow, pagination dot and add-to-cart control with a visible focus ring, Enter or Space opens a video, and Escape closes the player and returns focus to the tile you opened it from.

What happens if a shopper turns on reduced motion?

Auto-scrolling carousels and stories never start. The animation isn't loaded at all rather than started and then stopped, so there's no movement to catch. Shoppers without that setting get a pause control that stays paused until they resume it.

Will my custom CSS break accessibility?

No. The widgets keep their markup stable precisely so your CSS keeps working, and the keyboard and screen-reader behaviour is attached to those same elements. Colours are the one exception: if you set text or control colours with too little contrast, that's a failure your styling introduces.

Can you provide a VPAT or accessibility statement?

We can share our current test results, including the criteria we don't fully meet. We don't hold a third-party audit or a signed VPAT today, so if your procurement process requires one, get in touch and we'll tell you exactly what we can provide.

Still stuck?

Add shoppable video without adding a compliance problem

Install free and see the widgets behave on your own store — keyboard, screen reader and all.