Wrapping up the chain restaurant online ordering series, today's post is about everything that happens after I hit submit. Order tracking, chat with the driver, status updates, ratings, and reviews: all of it is part of the experience I rely on as a blind customer, and all of it has its own accessibility problems.
I'll walk through the patterns I keep running into across chains.
The chain or the driver regularly needs to message me after I have ordered: an item is unavailable, the order is running late, or the driver needs clarification on where to leave the food. These conversations almost always take place in a proprietary chat window that varies slightly from chain to chain. I have a lot of trouble with these chat systems.
New messages from the chain or driver are not always announced by my screen reader as they come in. When I miss responses, the conversation slows down or stalls. The driver showed up while I was still trying to figure out what they had said to me more than once.
I usually keep my screen reader focus on the message entry field so I can respond quickly when something comes in. On some chains, when a new message arrives, focus gets ripped out of that field and dropped at the top of the chat history. I have to scroll all the way back down to find where I was, which is a small disaster every time it happens.
When a chat message references a specific item in my order, the chain may include a picture of the item to save space. My screen reader cannot read the picture, and the chains rarely include alt text. I have no idea which item the driver or chain is talking about.
A walk through an entire chat flow is exactly what a proper accessibility audit covers, including the live behavior of focus management and new message announcements. Static page scans cannot catch most of what I just described.
Almost every chain shows a status banner near the top of the tracking page: Order Received, Preparing, Heading to You, Delivered, and so on. The text is supposed to update as the order moves through fulfillment. My screen reader gets that wrong in two completely opposite ways, depending on the chain.
On some chains, the banner updates visually, but my screen reader never picks up the change. If I leave focus on the banner, nothing announces. If I move focus away and come back, I sometimes get the new status, sometimes the old one, and sometimes I get nothing.
In the worst version, my screen reader announces the original status from when I placed the order and never updates beyond that, even after the food has been delivered. The banner is being treated as static plain text. I have to refresh the entire page to find out where my order actually is.
The other version is the exact opposite. My screen reader announces the current status nonstop, with barely a pause between announcements, even when nothing has changed. I cannot navigate to any other part of the page because the second I pause to listen for something else, the status banner starts shouting again.
Dynamic content, like a live status banner, needs real-time testing with assistive technology to catch. A free automated accessibility test will tell you the banner has a label, but it will not tell you what happens when the banner updates twelve times in a row.
I leave reviews when I can, because hearing from other blind customers helps me decide where to order. Most chains prompt me to rate the experience right after delivery. I run into accessibility issues on most of these rating forms.
The star scale is the most common version, and the stars are rarely properly labeled in the code. My screen reader either misses them entirely or reads them as something vague like "image, image, image." Either way, I cannot tell how many stars I have selected before or after I change it.
Surveys that use other rating scales, such as satisfaction sliders, face the same problem. The scale points are not labeled in a way my screen reader can interpret. I end up picking blind, which defeats the point of the rating.
When the form asks for a written comment, my screen reader does not announce the character count or limit on most chains. I do not know how much I can type until I try to submit and get rejected, or until I type too little and end up with nothing useful to say. So I either over-write and get cut off or under-write and submit garbage.
Where to start fixing a multi-component rating form depends on what is already in place and how much real-user testing the chain has done. Finding the right approach takes about two minutes if a team wants the short version.
The chat focus jump. Losing my place in the middle of a conversation with the driver and having to scroll all the way back down is one of the most disruptive bugs in the whole ordering flow.
My best guess is that one chain treats it as static text and the other has it set to announce on every page change. The fix is somewhere in the middle, but neither extreme works for me.
They matter to me, but I cannot submit half of them. The blind customer rating signal is missing for many chains due to accessibility issues, not because we do not want to leave feedback.
Status updates, I can hear them once when they happen. A chat that does not lose my focus when a new message arrives. A star scale that announces what I am picking. A comment field that tells me the limit before I type. None of that is hard.
Post-order is the part of the experience that feels most invisible to the teams building chain restaurant websites, and it shows. The chat, the status banner, the ratings: every one of them has been a source of frustration for me on at least one chain in the last year. It is the kind of stuff I think nobody on the team has actually tested with a screen reader on.
What the work to fix this costs is almost never the blocker. The blocker is that the post-order experience runs on a separate code path from the rest of the site, and nobody has put it on an accessibility roadmap.
That wraps the chain restaurant online ordering series. From menu to checkout to post-order, every stage follows the same patterns that blind customers break. Every stage is also fixable with the right testing and the right priorities.
Don't miss the other blogs in this 4-part series, starting with the first, "Chain Restaurant Online Ordering: How the Menu Fails Blind Customers."
For more insights on accessibility for restaurants and the hospitality industry, including how UsableNet can help, visit Food Service & Hospitality Accessibility Solutions
Editor's Note: Our frequent contributor, Michael Taylor, wrote this post. This post reflects his opinions and experiences. Read more about Michael and some other posts on his experience online here.