Shopify ADA Compliance: A Practical WCAG Checklist for Stores

The Justice Department's web accessibility guidance, published March 18, 2022, gives businesses flexibility in how they make their sites accessible. It also lists the barriers it sees most: poor color contrast, relying on color alone to convey information, missing alt text, videos without captions, inaccessible forms, and sites that only work with a mouse. A typical online store has chances to get every one of them wrong.

Some accessibility vendor pages say the ADA 'requires WCAG 2.2 AA' for online stores. That's not what the Justice Department's guidance for businesses says, as of September 2026. In practice, though, WCAG is the yardstick audits and demand letters measure against, and Shopify's own accessibility statement says it uses WCAG 2.2 as its guiding principle and aims for Level AA. Using the same target for your store is sensible.

For the wider legal picture, including the separate rules for state and local governments, see our ADA website compliance guide for small businesses. This checklist sticks to what a Shopify team can fix.

Shopify's Theme Store requirements, published in 2021, ask themes for a minimum average Lighthouse accessibility score of 90 across the home, product, collection and cart pages, plus manual checks for keyboard navigation, form labels, alt text, contrast, visible focus, logical focus order and touch target size. That's a good starting point, not a finish line. Shopify's help center says plainly that following its theme guidelines alone doesn't guarantee a fully accessible store.

Checkout is Shopify's, but it isn't perfect either. Shopify's accessibility conformance report for Checkout, dated March 2026, marks several WCAG criteria as only partially supported, including contrast, visible focus, target size and status messages, and it states that merchants are responsible for making sure their own store complies with applicable laws.

Fix these at the template level and every page benefits. Most map directly to Shopify's theme best practices on shopify.dev and to WCAG 2.2 success criteria.

Product pages carry most of a store's custom UI, and most of its accessibility bugs. Shopify's Theme Store article is blunt about alt text: using the product title in place of an image description isn't satisfactory. Describe what each image shows, such as the angle, the color and the detail that matters.

For large catalogs, Shopify's product CSV includes an Image Alt Text column. You can export products, fill in the column and import it back. Shopify's help center notes the field accepts up to 512 characters and suggests 125 or fewer. Test the import on a handful of products first, because a CSV import updates every column it contains.

Two failures are common. In the first, focus stays on the page behind the drawer, so a keyboard user tabs through invisible links while the drawer sits on top. In the second, focus goes into the drawer and can't get out, which fails WCAG 2.1.2, No Keyboard Trap.

Also check that the close button has a label a screen reader can read, that quantity changes inside the drawer announce the new total, and that the drawer's heading tells users where they are.

Cart drawers are also a common source of slow taps. If you're rebuilding one, fix its responsiveness in the same pass; our guide to Shopify INP and Core Web Vitals covers the performance side.

Apps inject interface your theme developer never built and often never tested. They're behind many of the problems a keyboard pass turns up, so test each app embed on its own.

If an app fails, check its settings for an accessible mode or layout, contact the developer with the specific failure, and switch off the embed if it blocks shoppers from buying. Ask vendors for their accessibility conformance information before you install, not after.

Content problems multiply with your catalog, so set rules for new uploads even before you fix old ones.

If a creative partner produces your product and ad videos (we make social and ad creative for Shopify brands such as MADLUVV), ask for caption files as part of the delivery rather than adding them later. Captioning during the edit is simpler than retrofitting a whole video library.

No single test is enough. The W3C's Easy Checks are a good first review, but the W3C itself warns that a page can pass them and still have significant accessibility barriers. Combine three passes on your key templates: home, collection, product, cart drawer, cart page and a sample content page.

Start where one fix repairs thousands of pages. A template fix to the product page, header or cart drawer applies to every product at once. Catalog content, such as alt text for every image, is slower and scales with the size of your catalog.

Budget follows the same split. Template fixes are developer time and depend on how custom your theme is; a heavily modified theme takes longer to fix than a current Shopify theme with few edits. If your theme is old and heavily patched, it's worth comparing theme customization with a custom theme before paying for fixes twice.

Accessibility drifts. A theme update changes a component, a new app adds a popup, a new product drop goes live with no alt text. Build checks into the routine instead of running one big audit a year.

Add alt text and captions to your product upload checklist. Run a keyboard pass after every theme update and every new app. Re-check contrast whenever someone changes brand colors in the theme editor. And keep a short log of what you tested and when; it's useful evidence of ongoing effort.

If you'd like help with the template-level work, the WordPress & Shopify team at Pixel2Tech fixes themes on a duplicate copy and tests with keyboard and screen reader before anything goes live.