Case Study — Hadley Store
Accessible ecommerce website design for a card you read by touch
Every year the Hadley Woman's Board sells a holiday card with its greeting printed in both ink and embossed braille. Its shoppers include older adults and people with vision loss, so the store had to be as easy to use without good eyesight as with it.
A walkthrough of the finished store.
The brief
Replace a generic storefront with one anybody can finish a purchase on.
The card has funded Hadley's work with older adults adjusting to vision loss since the late 1950s. Orders ran through a stock Square Online store, where personalizing cards meant reading a block of instructions and then adding imprinting as one of six separate add-on products.
A fully branded store where physical and digital cards sit side by side, and a full order can be placed by keyboard, by screen reader, or at 200% zoom. Square had to stay in charge of payments, so nothing changed for the people filling orders.
The first screen
Before · 2025A banner, then a wall of text. Nothing to buy until you scroll.
After · 2026Both ways to buy are on the first screen, one button each.
Personalizing an order
Before · 2025Imprinting was six separate add-on products, three per price tier, added after the cards.
After · 2026One set of options, priced from the pack count, with the lines shown on the card as you type.
Before screenshots: the store as the Internet Archive saved it on October 8, 2025, with its original product photos.
The build
A custom store in front, Hadley's existing Square account behind it.
Custom store, same Square
The storefront, cart, and checkout are built from scratch. Prices come live from Square and every order lands in the account Hadley already uses. Card numbers go straight to Square and never touch the site's server.
Accessible by default
There's no separate "accessible version." The one site works by keyboard and screen reader, and an optional Display panel adds larger text, more contrast, or less motion, then remembers the choice on every page.
One checkout for everything
Card packs, personal and corporate digital cards, and donations all go through a single order. Shipping questions only show up when something actually ships.
A card you can open
The 3D card from Hadley's digital card, which I built in 2025, opens right on the product page. Buyers see their imprint lines on it as they type, and the imprint price updates with the number of packs.
On any screen
Large type and full-width buttons on a phone, with every option and price still there at narrow widths.
The result
A store that holds up when someone can't see the screen well.
The store is live for the 2026 season at brailleholidaycard.hadleyhelps.org. I wanted to make sure it was up to accessibility standards, so I ran Lighthouse and axe-core against the live pages.
It launched this year, so the numbers below are about how the store works, not how it sold.
Lighthouse accessibility score on every page of the store
automated WCAG 2.2 AA failures on every page, with or without items in the cart
contrast on all body text, the stricter AAA bar
browser zoom on every page with nothing cut off and no sideways scrolling
Lighthouse 12, axe-core, and a 200% zoom check on the live store, October 2026.
More of the work
Three more builds, start to finish. The full set lives in the portfolio.
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