Free Shopify Accessibility Checker
Enter your store URL to scan for the accessibility barriers that put Shopify merchants at risk under the ADA. CompliaScan tests your live theme against WCAG 2.2 using axe-core, checking product image alt text, color contrast, form labels, and more. Results in seconds.
Where Shopify Stores Commonly Fail Accessibility
Shopify handles a lot for you, but accessibility lives in the parts you control: the theme you bought, the apps you installed, and the products you uploaded. These are the failures we see most often on real stores.
Third-party apps injecting inaccessible markup
Review widgets, upsell popups, wishlist buttons, and cookie banners each inject their own HTML into your storefront. You did not write it, but it renders on your domain, and its unlabeled buttons or trapped focus become your compliance problem.
Missing or auto-generated product image alt text
Bulk CSV imports and dropshipping apps rarely populate alt text, and Shopify does not invent it for you. A catalog with hundreds of products often ships hundreds of images that a screen reader announces as a file name or nothing at all.
Contrast baked into a paid theme
Light-gray captions, sale badges, and muted placeholder text look great in the theme demo but often fail the 4.5:1 contrast ratio. Because it is set in the theme settings and CSS, every page inherits the same failure until you change it.
Keyboard traps in mega-menus and predictive search
Rich drop-down navigation and instant search results are usually built for mouse and touch first. Keyboard-only shoppers can hit focus that disappears behind the panel, or results they cannot reach with Tab and arrow keys.
Unlabeled newsletter and contact fields
Footer newsletter signups and contact forms frequently rely on placeholder text alone with no real label. Screen readers cannot reliably announce a placeholder, so the field is effectively unusable for the people the ADA is meant to protect.
Checkout accessibility on Plus vs standard
Standard checkout is controlled by Shopify, so you cannot edit its markup. Shopify Plus merchants who customized checkout.liquid, or who add checkout extensions, can introduce their own barriers in the highest-stakes step of the funnel.
Do Accessibility Apps and Overlays Make Your Store Compliant?
The Shopify App Store lists several accessibility apps that promise compliance in one click, usually by adding an overlay: a floating toolbar plus a script that tries to patch your page as it loads. It is an appealing pitch, and it is worth being clear about what these tools actually do.
An overlay does not rewrite your theme. Your product images still lack alt text in the underlying HTML, your low-contrast badges are still low contrast, and your unlabeled form fields are still unlabeled. The overlay sits on top and applies best-guess fixes at runtime, which is very different from correcting the source. Many screen reader users and accessibility advocates report that overlays interfere with the assistive technology people already use, and stores running an overlay have still received ADA demand letters.
The honest version
A widget can make a store look like it is doing something about accessibility without changing the experience for the people who need it. Real, durable compliance comes from fixing the issues in your theme and content. CompliaScan is built to find those issues so you can fix the source, not paper over it. Our AI fix suggestions are bring-your-own-key, and CompliaScan never modifies your store. You review each suggested change and apply it in your own theme.
Alt Text, Themes, and Checkout: What Trips Up Shopify Merchants
Four areas account for most of what an automated scan flags on a Shopify store. Understanding each one makes the fixes far quicker.
Product image alt text at catalog scale
Alt text is the single most common Shopify failure because it scales with your catalog. Every product, variant, and collection image needs a description a screen reader can read aloud. Set it per image in the admin, or fix it in bulk through the product CSV Image Alt Text column. In Liquid themes, banner and section images use the image_tag filter, which takes an alt argument you can wire to a section setting. Decorative images should get empty alt text so screen readers skip them; meaningful product photos need real descriptions.
Theme contrast and color settings
Many premium themes ship with muted grays for secondary text, sale prices, and placeholder copy that fall below WCAG 2.2 AA contrast. Because these come from theme color settings and CSS, one bad value repeats across your entire store. A scan flags the exact elements and their measured ratios so you can adjust the theme settings or a small amount of custom CSS instead of guessing.
Keyboard navigation in menus and search
Mega-menus, filter drawers, and predictive search are where keyboard accessibility quietly breaks. A shopper using only a keyboard should be able to open the menu, move through it, and close it without focus vanishing or getting stuck. Automated tools can flag likely issues such as missing focus handling, but confirming the experience needs a keyboard test and, ideally, a screen reader.
Checkout: standard vs Shopify Plus
On standard checkout, the markup is Shopify's, so your risk is lower there and higher on the storefront you control. Shopify Plus merchants who edited checkout.liquid, or who build checkout UI extensions, own that accessibility again. Since checkout is where the money is, an inaccessible field or unannounced error here does the most damage, both to shoppers and to conversion.
What an Automated Scan Catches on Shopify, and What It Cannot
CompliaScan runs axe-core plus nine custom checks and automatically detects roughly 30-40% of WCAG 2.2 success criteria: the objective, machine-testable ones. That is exactly the set of issues that show up first in most demand letters, so it is a fast, high-value place to start. The rest of WCAG needs human judgment, and no automated tool should claim otherwise.
What the scan catches automatically
- Missing or empty alt text on product and collection images
- Color contrast failures in theme text, badges, and buttons
- Newsletter, search, and contact fields with no associated label
- A missing document language on the storefront
- Empty icon-only links and buttons common in theme headers
- Broken or skipped heading levels on product and collection pages
What still needs a human
- Whether product image alt text is actually descriptive
- Whether mega-menu and predictive search work in a real screen reader
- Whether keyboard focus order through checkout makes sense
- Whether form error messages are announced to assistive technology
- Whether dynamic app content updates are communicated to screen readers
A starting point, not a certificate
A clean automated scan is the strongest first step you can take, but it is not a guarantee of legal compliance and it is not a substitute for a manual audit or testing with real assistive technology users. Use the scan to fix the objective issues fast, then layer manual review on top for full coverage.
Related Resources
WCAG Checker
Scan any page against WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA success criteria, the technical standard behind ADA, EAA, and Section 508.
ADA Compliance Checker
Check any website against ADA requirements based on WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the benchmark courts reference in enforcement.
Color Contrast Checker
Test foreground and background color pairs against WCAG contrast ratios before you bake them into your theme settings.
View Pricing
Free tier available. Upgrade for multi-page crawling of your full catalog, fixes on every issue, PDF reports, and monitoring.
Other platform accessibility checkers
Free WCAG 2.2 scanners tuned to how each website builder works.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my Shopify store ADA compliant?
Do Shopify accessibility apps or overlays make my store compliant?
How do I add alt text to Shopify product images?
Which Shopify theme accessibility issues can an automated scan catch?
Scan Your Shopify Store for Accessibility Now
Do not wait for a demand letter. Run a free scan to see where your storefront stands against the WCAG 2.2 criteria courts use in ADA enforcement. Results in seconds, no signup required.