A Strong Guide to Shopify ADA Compliance

Shopify website owners have been relentlessly targeted in ADA website compliance lawsuits with no end in sight as of June 2026. In fact, many of our clients are Shopify small business owners who have come to us after being sued in New York, California, and Florida.

Below is the map to making your Shopify store ADA compliant.

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Why Do Shopify Store Owners Keep Getting Sued?

A huge chunk of our clients are Shopify owners and over 80% of them have come to us after being sued over website accessibility. We’ve set out the legal and technical reasons why store owners get sued, but here are some AI generated stats on why Shopify accessibility can make sense from a business POV.

Legal Reason

The general legal reason that Shopify owners are targeted is ecommerce websites are online stores and so it’s easy for plaintiffs’ lawyers to make the case that ecommerce websites fall under one of the 12 categories of places of public accommodations under Title III of the ADA.

For those of you keeping score at home, ADA Title III Sec. 12181. Definitions is the place to read:

(7) Public accommodation

The following private entities are considered public accommodations for purposes of this subchapter, if the operations of such entities affect commerce

(E) a bakery, grocery store, clothing store, hardware store, shopping center, or other sales or rental establishment;

This is why, of all of the website types on the internet, there seems to be a gravitational pull for ecommerce websites to be sued over ADA compliance.

Technical Reason

The technical reason why so many Shopify owners can’t get out of the way of litigation is because there are so many different dynamic/interactive elements located in so many different files within Shopify themes that it’s really hard to wrangle everything.

If you’re a confused small business owner, it’s not like there’s this on/off switch for accessibility that you’re missing out on. Or it’s not like there’s just a few toggle buttons and checkboxes inside the dashboard that you need to take care of.

Here’s a screenshot to illustrate what I mean.

This screenshot is specifically for accessibility options (e.g., skip to content) in your Shopify theme, but merely filling this out won’t make your website “ADA compliant,” not even close.

You really need to have an experienced developer who needs to either be proficient in accessibility or skilled enough to pick up accessibility through instructions. And this is because there’s advanced coding stuff that needs to be accounted for.

What you need to do is have an accessibility audit conducted to find all of the accessibility issues and then fix each issue until you’ve resolved them all.

We released a major AI breakthrough through our Accessibility Tracker platform. After you receive your audit report, if you upload it to Tracker, AI will assist your developer, designer, etc. for each fix in the audit report.

This isn’t automated remediation, but it will dramatically improve the results even if a developer is brand new to accessibility. This saves real time and money and you can finish your project much faster.

Your Shopify Theme Choice

Every Shopify owner has probably come across the Dawn theme at some point. It’s the default theme you’re presented with when you sign up for Shopify.

The theme you select has a huge impact on your accessibility and how much work needs to be done. If you choose a theme that hasn’t incorporated accessibility, you’ll have much more work ahead of you.

If your theme claims WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, that’s an encouraging start, but there’s no reason to drop your napkin and run to the buffet. You still need to make sure the claims aren’t just there for the sale and everything’s hollow underneath.

It’s like those brand new apartments that look super nice and say they have all sorts of amenities, but after a month you realize the dog park isn’t going to be built for months, the walls are paper thin, and the dishwasher doesn’t really wash anything.

Your theme’s accessibility is crucial, but it isn’t everything. Even a theme that’s genuinely WCAG 2.1 AA conformant out of the box only gets you the theme itself. The moment you customize the code, upload products and content, or add apps and widgets, you can introduce new accessibility issues the theme had nothing to do with. So treat a conformant theme as your floor, not your finish line. (We break down exactly how customization creates new issues a little further down.)

This also hints at why Shopify doesn’t do more out of the box. With so many themes in circulation, they’re only policing accessibility in a very lightweight way.

Well, I suppose they’re policing accessibility in a very lightweight way. Like LuluLemon token rental security guard kind of way.

Here are the Shopify theme accessibility rules straight from the horse’s mouth:

Theme Store Requirements

All themes must meet all of the following requirements to be published on the Shopify Theme Store. If your theme is missing any of the requirements in this list, then your submission will be rejected and you will need to make further changes to your theme before it can be resubmitted.

5. Lighthouse performance and accessibility

Themes must have a minimum average Lighthouse performance score of 60 across the theme’s product, collection, and home page, for both desktop and mobile. Tests are run using a benchmark dataset.

Themes must have a minimum average Lighthouse accessibility score of 90 across the theme’s product, collection, and home page, for both desktop and mobile. Tests are run using a benchmark dataset.

Not that it really matters, but is it 60 or is it 90? You can read the Shopify theme accessibility requirements for yourself and see if you can figure out why they just repeated the paragraph a second time with 90 instead of 60.

But they could have said 100 and it wouldn’t make a difference.

Google Lighthouse is a light automated accessibility scan that flags a very limited subset of accessibility issues. And just like all scans, it flags issues non-conclusively which means even of the issues that scans flag, they still can’t catch some things.

It doesn’t matter whether you use Google Lighthouse, WAVE, AXE, PowerMapper, or any other popular scan (checker), none are going to tell you how to make your Shopify website “ADA compliant.”

They’re a very nice tool to start with and we always recommend getting your WAVE errors down to zero, but that’s only a start.

So to recap, requiring an average Google Lighthouse score of 60 or 90 means very, very little. Sure, it can help accessibility a little bit. But by no means does this mean you can pick up a theme off the street and think your website is “ADA compliant.”

Customizing Your Shopify Theme

Even if you were to cherry pick the saintliest of themes that had perfect WCAG 2.1 AA – or even better, WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, any customization you do or any content you upload can easily introduce accessibility issues that could lead to a lawsuit.

Going with the classic alt text example, let’s say you upload product images, but don’t add alternative text or mark non-meaningful images as decorative, you would introduce accessibility issues by doing so.

And the same possibility can happen by relying upon store apps, integrating a newsletter, adding new custom features, and so on.

How Do You Make Your Shopify Theme Accessible?

1. Make sure you have all of the easy settings in place
2. Make sure your content (text, images, video, audio, documents) are accessible
3. Update the code to be WCAG 2.1 AA conformant

That last part is not for the faint of heart because, as we’ve said, there are a lot of files and a lot of code to get through. Let’s cover some of the accessibility considerations as you add products and fix the backend of your Shopify website.

Adding a New Product

Starting off easy, we can make several accessibility considerations just when adding a new product to our store:

• Descriptive title
• Alternative text for images
• Closed captioning for videos
• Audio descriptions for videos
• Subheadings
• Descriptive anchor text for links

There can be more, but these items are what we’d focus in on when adding a new product.

How to Edit Your Theme’s Code

Next, let’s go straight into the hard part: editing code in the various files that serve as the foundation to your theme.

There are a few ways to get to the actual code, but the one shown in the screenshot is we’re going to the Shopify dashboard and under the Sales channels category, we’re going to Online Store and then themes shows up as a sub category along with blog posts, pages, navigation, and preferences.

We’re going to click on themes and then we’ll see whatever our current theme is featured. For the purposes of this guide, we have the Dawn theme set. And now we go to customize and we can choose the edit code option from the pop up.

And now you’ve arrived into flavor country. This is where the heavy duty, Ford truck accessibility work goes in and ADA website demand letters are sent or never written.

On the screen shot, we have several tabs of important Shopify sections open such as:

• footer.liquid
• main-product.liquid
• page.liquid
• main-search.liquid

And the list goes on. The current file being edited is main-product.liquid. Some of the main accessibility considerations here will be:

• semantic HTML
• programmatic form field labels
• name, state, role, and/or value for interactive elements
• keyboard navigability

But we’re going to have to go through all of the files with accessibility implications for our store and make sure everything is coded correctly.

And when you consider that there are 5 billion Shopify themes, it now makes more sense why there isn’t a giant, universal tutorial on how to make Shopify websites ADA compliant.

Shopify Accessibility Checklist

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the technical standards that we reference for how to make a website accessible. And by no coincidence, they’re also a best practice for ADA website compliance.

WCAG 2.1 AA is comprised of 50 success criteria or requirements for conformance. Think of success criteria as things to do or account for in accessibility. Below we’ve created a checklist of the practical application of WCAG to Shopify.

Note: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are quite technical and layered so this list by no means covers everything.

Use of Semantic HTML

• Purpose: Semantic HTML helps screen readers and other assistive technologies understand the structure and navigation of your website.
• Implementation: Use headings to indicate the main topic and sub topics of a page. Use semantic bulleted lists rather than dashes. Use appropriate HTML tags like <header>, <footer>, <main>, <nav>, and <article>. For interactive elements such as buttons or links, ensure you use <button> or <a> tags instead of non-semantic <div> or <span> tags.

Alt Text for Images

• Purpose: Alt text helps users who cannot visually see images understand what meaning they convey. Remember, for decorative images, you should leave the alt attribute blank – unless the image is linked.
• Implementation: Every image on your Shopify site should have a concise and descriptive alt attribute. For example, <img src="example.jpg" alt="Detailed description of the image's context">.

Keyboard Navigability

• Purpose: Ensures users can navigate your site using a keyboard, particularly important for those with motor disabilities.
• Implementation: All interactive elements should be accessible by tab keys. Rely on natural DOM order, use tabindex="0" and tabindex="-1" only, and never positive integers. Regularly test keyboard navigation to ensure all content is accessible.

ARIA Attributes for Accessibility

• Purpose: ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes help provide additional information to screen reader users.
• Implementation: Use ARIA roles and properties to enhance accessibility, especially for dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. For example, aria-label, aria-hidden, and aria-live can be crucial.

Ensuring Sufficient Contrast

• Purpose: Text and background should have enough contrast so that text is readable by users with visual impairments.
• Implementation: Use tools like the WebAIM Contrast Checker to ensure that text and background colors meet a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.

Accessible Forms

• Purpose: Forms should be programmatically labeled, fully keyboard navigable, and allow for autocomplete when possible.
• Implementation: Label all form elements clearly with <label> tags. Use id on the form element and for on the label for association. Ensure error messages are also accessible and clearly state how users can fix submission errors.

Responsive and Mobile Accessibility

• Purpose: Your website should adapt to and perform well on different devices, displays, and landscape and portrait orientation.
• Implementation: Use responsive design practices to ensure your Shopify site works well on both desktop and mobile devices. Test accessibility on mobile to ensure features like touch targets are large enough and spaced appropriately.

Link Text Purpose

• Purpose: Clear link text ensures that users, especially those with screen readers, understand the purpose of each link without requiring additional context.
• Implementation: Use descriptive link texts that provide clear information about the link’s destination or function. Avoid vague text like “click here” or “learn more.”

Error Identification and Suggestions

• Purpose: Helps users identify, understand, and correct errors easily, particular