Shopify Accessibility Audit

Colour and size swatches in Dawn and most themes are rendered as styled labels or spans. A screen reader user hears a hex code, a number, or nothing at all. Sold-out combinations are shown by a diagonal line or by dimming, both invisible if you are not looking at the screen.

The fix: a real fieldset and radio group with a visible legend, each option carrying its name as text, unavailable options marked with aria-disabled and stated in words, and the price and availability update announced through a live region.

Add to cart slides a drawer in from the side. Focus usually stays on the button behind it, the drawer has no dialog role, focus is not trapped, and Escape does nothing. A keyboard user has no idea a drawer opened; a screen reader user hears silence after adding an item.

The fix: role=”dialog” with aria-modal, focus moved into the drawer, focus trapped while it is open, Escape closes it, focus returned to the trigger, and a live region confirming what was added.

Filtering a collection replaces the product grid over AJAX. Nothing is announced, so a screen reader user cannot tell whether the filter worked or how many products remain. Active filters are often indicated by colour alone.

The fix: a polite live region announcing the result count, real checkboxes with labels, active state exposed in markup, and deliberate focus handling after the grid updates.

Bulk imports leave alt text as SKUs or filenames. On a collection page of forty items that is forty meaningless announcements. Where the photograph is the only description of a pattern or finish, the information is simply missing for some customers.

The fix: alt text that describes the product, duplicate gallery angles marked decorative, and a content rule so new uploads do not reintroduce it.

Review widgets, pop-ups, upsell drawers, cookie banners and chat launchers are written by third parties and dropped into your page. They routinely trap focus, appear above everything with no close button reachable by keyboard, and auto-open on a timer.

The fix: audit each app separately, configure or replace the offenders, and hold your vendors to account. The report names the app for each barrier so the decision is yours to make with evidence.

White on light sale badges, grey shipping notes under the price, pale placeholder text and low-contrast disabled buttons. Automated scanners find these first, which makes them the items most often cited in demand letters.

The fix: a palette pass across theme settings, bringing every text and background pair to 4.5 to 1, and 3 to 1 for large text and interface components.

Shopify controls checkout. On standard plans very little can be edited, and on Plus with checkout extensibility rather more. Either way, some failures will not be yours to fix.

The fix: fix what is in your control, raise the rest with Shopify support in writing, and record the remaining constraints in your accessibility statement. Documenting a platform limitation you have reported is a far better position than silence.

Rotating announcement bars and auto-advancing hero slides fail WCAG 2.2.2 and are hostile to anyone reading slowly or using magnification. Text baked into slide images is invisible to a screen reader.

The fix: a visible pause control, real text over images rather than inside them, and keyboard-operable controls with correct announcements.

No. Shopify gives you a platform; your store is the theme plus your customisations plus apps plus your product content. Dawn and most Shopify themes ship with keyboard and screen reader problems in the variant picker, the cart drawer and the collection filters. Shopify itself states that accessibility is the merchant responsibility.

Shopify hosts millions of stores, most run a small number of popular themes, and the same theme-level barriers appear across all of them. That makes automated discovery easy: a firm can scan thousands of stores for the same failure and send the same letter to each.

Both. I build and maintain an accessible Shopify theme, so the fixes in the report are ones I have already shipped. You can hand the report to your own developers or have my team apply the changes to your Liquid files.

Partly. Checkout is controlled by Shopify and most of it cannot be edited unless you are on Shopify Plus with checkout extensibility. The audit is explicit about which failures are yours to fix, which need a Shopify support request and which are platform constraints you should document in your accessibility statement.

Frequently. Review widgets, pop-ups, upsell drawers, cookie banners and chat launchers are among the worst offenders, because they inject markup you never wrote. The audit names the app responsible for each barrier so you can decide whether to configure it, replace it or remove it.

One to two weeks for a typical store, from scope to report. Remediation is usually three to six weeks depending on how many barriers sit inside apps rather than your own theme.

No. Overlay and widget apps sit on top of the theme and cannot repair the variant picker or the cart drawer underneath. Stores running them still receive demand letters, and the app sometimes introduces its own barriers.