Mother's Day Flower Orders: 6 Accessibility Failures Costing Florists Sales This Weekend

Mother’s Day is the single biggest sales day of the year for most florist websites. In the U.S. it routinely outsells Valentine’s Day, and the order window is shockingly short — most customers buy between Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, with a long tail of last-minute orders placed Sunday morning.

If your site has accessibility problems, this is the weekend they cost you the most money. A blind grandparent trying to send flowers to their daughter, a person with motor impairments scheduling a Sunday-morning surprise delivery, an elderly father with low vision picking out a bouquet — these are some of the most motivated customers you have. They have already decided to buy. They just need a website that doesn’t fight them.

Here are six accessibility failures we see again and again on florist sites this week, and the plain-English fixes you can ship in an afternoon.

1. Product photos with empty or generic alt text

This is the single most common — and most expensive — defect on florist websites. You have a beautiful catalog of arrangements: tall vase, hand-tied bouquet, sympathy basket, garden-style centerpiece. Each one is presented as a photo with the alt text empty, blank, or set to something useless like flowers.jpg, arrangement, or IMG_3492.

A customer using a screen reader hears “image, image, image, image” and cannot tell what they are looking at. They can’t compare arrangements. They can’t pick the one for Mom. They leave.

Fix it this afternoon: Open your product catalog in your storefront admin (Shopify, Squarespace, BloomNation, FloristWare, Lovingly, whatever you use) and add a real description to every “alt text” or “image description” field. Write what the customer would say:

“Round arrangement in clear glass cube vase with white roses, pink peonies, and eucalyptus greenery, approximately 10 inches tall and 10 inches wide. Suitable for Mother’s Day.”

That’s it. No special skills required. If you only have time to do twenty arrangements before Sunday, do your top twenty Mother’s Day sellers first.

2. Same-day-delivery date pickers that won’t accept a keyboard

Most florist sites have a custom calendar widget for picking the delivery date. The customer is supposed to click a date with their mouse. Try this instead: open your own site in a browser, click on the delivery date field, and try to use only the Tab and arrow keys to pick a date. Most of the time, nothing happens. The keyboard is locked out entirely.

This is a problem for customers with motor impairments who cannot use a mouse, customers using switch devices, screen-reader users, and anyone whose mouse just died. On a holiday weekend, that’s not a small group.

Fix it this afternoon: Talk to your website vendor — or, if you self-host on Shopify or WordPress, swap the custom calendar widget for a plain HTML date field (<input type="date">). It looks slightly less stylish, but it works for everyone, on every device, with every assistive technology, with zero JavaScript. Most major florist platforms (Lovingly, BloomNation, FloristWare) have a setting to use the native date picker — turn it on.

If you cannot ship that change before Sunday, do this instead: at the very top of your delivery page, add a clearly visible phone number with the words “Can’t use the date picker? Call us at [your number] and we’ll take your order on the phone.” Make sure someone is actually answering that phone Saturday and Sunday.

3. Delivery-time-window selectors that hide all the information in color

Most sites offer time windows: “Today by 2 PM,” “Today after 4 PM,” “Tomorrow morning.” The standard implementation is a row of colored buttons — green for available, gray for unavailable, red for “fully booked.” The text labels are tiny or absent.

If you can’t see the colors clearly, you have no idea which slots are open. People with color-blindness, low vision, or aging eyes simply cannot tell. They guess, hit a fully-booked slot, get an error, and leave.

Fix it this afternoon: Make sure every time-window button has a clear text label that says what it actually means: “Today by 2:00 PM — order in the next 90 minutes,” “Today after 4:00 PM — fully booked,” “Sunday morning — available.” The customer should be able to read the page in pure black-and-white and still understand which slots are available.

If you can’t change the buttons themselves, add a heading above them: “All slots shown are currently available. Sold-out slots have been removed.” Then make sure your booking system actually removes sold-out slots instead of greying them out.

4. Funeral-home and hospital-delivery lookups that don’t work without a mouse

Sympathy and hospital deliveries are 25–40 percent of florist revenue, but the funeral-home lookup widget is one of the most consistently inaccessible features on the entire site. The customer types in a city or ZIP code, a list of funeral homes drops down, and they’re supposed to click one.

Try selecting a funeral home with only the keyboard. On most sites, you can’t. The dropdown doesn’t respond to arrow keys. You can’t hear which funeral home is highlighted. You give up and pick the wrong one. The flowers go to the wrong service. The customer is mortified, you have to refund and re-send, and you’ve lost both the customer and the money.

Fix it this afternoon: This one is harder to fix without your developer or vendor’s help, but you can put a clear fallback in place today. Right above the funeral-home search field, add a notice:

“Don’t see the funeral home you need, or having trouble with the search? Call us at [your number] — we deliver to every funeral home in our service area, and we’ll confirm the address with you on the phone before we send the driver.”

Make this visible. Don’t bury it in the FAQ. A grieving customer should not have to hunt for the rescue path.

5. Variation pickers (Standard / Deluxe / Premium) with no description of what changes

Almost every florist site offers each arrangement in three sizes: Standard, Deluxe, Premium. The price difference is significant — often $20–$40 between Standard and Premium. But the page rarely tells the customer what they’re paying for. The Standard photo is just a slightly smaller version of the Deluxe photo. There’s no text explanation.

A sighted customer can squint at the photos and guess. A blind customer using a screen reader hears “Standard, Deluxe, Premium” and has no information at all. They pick the cheapest option, or they leave because they can’t tell whether Premium is worth twice the price.

Fix it this afternoon: For each variation, add a one-sentence description directly under the option label. Examples:

  • Standard ($79): Approximately 10 stems in a 6-inch glass vase. Best for desktops or small side tables.
  • Deluxe ($109): Approximately 18 stems in an 8-inch glass vase, with additional roses and eucalyptus. Best for kitchen counters or dining tables.
  • Premium ($149): Approximately 28 stems in a 10-inch glass vase, with peonies, lisianthus, and seasonal accent flowers added. Best for living-room centerpieces or as a “wow” gift.

This single change typically lifts conversion on premium tiers by 10–25 percent — not just for accessibility, but for everyone. Customers buy more when they understand what they’re buying.

6. The post-purchase confirmation that disappears in three seconds

The customer fills out the form, enters their card, hits submit — and a small green “Order placed!” banner appears at the top of the page for three seconds, then vanishes. No confirmation page. No order number on screen. The email confirmation will arrive in twenty minutes (or, on a busy holiday weekend, an hour).

Sighted customers see the green banner and have a vague sense the order went through. Screen-reader users may not hear it announced at all if it’s implemented as a transient toast. Customers with cognitive disabilities, low vision, or anxiety lose the feedback they need to be sure the order happened. They reload the page, the cart is empty, the banner is gone, and now they’re not sure if they paid once, twice, or zero times. They call your shop in a panic on Saturday afternoon.

Fix it this afternoon: Make sure your checkout flow ends on a real, persistent confirmation page with the order number, the recipient’s name, the delivery date and window, and a clear instruction: “You’ll receive a confirmation email within 5 minutes. If you don’t, please call us at [phone].” The page should not auto-redirect, auto-close, or rely on a banner that fades out.

If your checkout platform doesn’t support a persistent confirmation page, at minimum lengthen the success banner to stay visible for at least 20 seconds and add an order number to it.

A 60-minute pre-Mother’s-Day audit checklist

If you’ve got an hour this afternoon, walk through your site as a customer would:

  1. Open your homepage in a browser. Press Tab repeatedly. Can you reach every link, button, and form field? Can you see where the focus is at every step?
  2. Pick a Mother’s Day arrangement. Read the alt text on the product photo. Does it actually describe the arrangement?
  3. Read the variation descriptions for Standard / Deluxe / Premium. Can a customer who has never seen the photo tell what they’re getting?
  4. Try to schedule a same-day delivery using only the keyboard. Can you?
  5. Check the time-window selector. Does it tell you in plain text which windows are available, or only with color?
  6. Complete a test order. Does the confirmation stay on screen?
  7. Look at your sympathy and hospital-delivery flows. Is there a clear “call us” fallback for customers who can’t use the search?
  8. Make sure your phone number is staffed Saturday and Sunday — and that the person answering is empowered to take a complete order over the phone.

You will not get to perfect accessibility before Sunday. Nobody does. But the six fixes above are the difference between a customer who leaves your site frustrated and a customer who hits “Place Order.” On the highest-revenue weekend of the year, that’s the difference between a great Mother’s Day and a disappointing one.

Florists have been one of the most-targeted small-business categories for accessibility lawsuits since 2023. California Unruh statutory damages are $4,000 per visit. New York State and New York City attorneys file in waves of 30–80 cases per quarter, often timed to land just after major holidays. Florida and Pennsylvania settlements typically run $5,000–$20,000 plus remediation costs.

The European Accessibility Act, which took effect on June 28, 2025, explicitly covers consumer e-commerce. If you take orders from customers in any EU member state — including for cross-border deliveries via Teleflora, Interflora, or Euroflorist — your storefront is in scope and member-state regulators can fine non-conforming services up to €1 million.

None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to start somewhere — and starting with the six fixes above puts you in materially better shape than 90 percent of florist sites we audit. The rest can come in the weeks after Mother’s Day, when you have time to breathe.

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