If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store, accessibility is not just a design preference — it is a legal exposure. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is routinely applied to online stores, and store owners receive demand letters and lawsuits over barriers that most of them never knew existed.
Our own accessibility team tracks this closely: 4,928 accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US in 2025, and around 70% of them targeted e-commerce businesses. Small and mid-sized stores are not exempt — in practice, they are the most common targets, because their sites are rarely audited.
Why do online stores get sued over accessibility?
A store is at risk when disabled shoppers cannot complete basic tasks: browsing products, using search and filters, adding items to the cart, or checking out. The legal standard courts most often reference is WCAG 2.1 AA — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If your store fails those criteria in ways that block real users, a demand letter can follow.
The most common failures we find in store audits:
- Product images with missing or useless alt text for screen-reader users
- Keyboard traps — add-to-cart buttons, popups and menus that cannot be reached or used by keyboard
- Low color contrast (we regularly measure text at 2.8:1 against a required 4.5:1)
- Unlabeled form and checkout fields, so screen readers cannot say what to type
- Broken heading order and missing landmarks, making pages impossible to navigate by sound
Does an accessibility widget protect my store?
No. Overlay widgets adjust how a page looks; they do not repair the underlying code, labels, keyboard behavior or checkout flow that lawsuits are actually about. Courts and plaintiffs’ firms know the difference, and some regulators have explicitly warned businesses that a widget alone does not make a site compliant. Real protection comes from finding the issues in your theme and fixing them in the code — then re-testing.
What does a real accessibility audit check?
A proper audit combines automated scanning with manual testing — keyboard-only navigation, screen-reader passes, and a review of your product pages, cart and checkout. At Vellwer Agency we check 40+ points across images and media, keyboard and focus order, contrast and text, forms and checkout, page structure and ARIA, and a final screen-reader pass. You receive a findings report that shows each issue, its severity, and where it lives in your store.
What should a store owner do first?
Start with a check, not a purchase. We offer a free accessibility check: send us your store URL and we will review your store and report the headline issues within 48 hours — no card, and no sales call unless you ask for one. If the report shows real risk, you can choose an audit only, an audit with the fixes done for you, or ongoing monitoring.
How an accessibility claim actually unfolds
Most store owners first hear about accessibility through a demand letter, not a courtroom. A law firm — often one that files many of these cases — sends a letter listing barriers their tester found on your store: images a screen reader cannot describe, a checkout a keyboard cannot complete, forms with no labels. The letter usually asks for two things: money, and a commitment to fix the site to the WCAG standard within a set period.
If the letter is ignored, a formal complaint can follow. From there, most cases settle — the store pays a settlement and legal costs, and signs an agreement to remediate the site and keep it compliant, sometimes with monitoring for a year or more. The expensive part is rarely the settlement alone: it is the settlement plus your own legal fees plus the rushed remediation work, all done under time pressure instead of at a planned pace.
This is why the order of operations matters. A store that audits and fixes its barriers before any letter arrives does the same work for a fraction of the total cost, on its own schedule, and can show a dated audit report as evidence of good faith if a claim ever does arrive.
The barriers that trigger claims, in detail
Images without useful alt text. A screen reader can only speak what the code tells it. When product images have no alt text — or junk alt text like a file name — blind shoppers cannot tell what you sell. On a product page, that is the equivalent of a sighted shopper seeing blank boxes.
Keyboard traps and broken focus order. Many shoppers cannot use a mouse. They move through your store with the Tab key, in the order your code presents elements. Popups that cannot be closed by keyboard, menus that open but never receive focus, and add-to-cart buttons the focus order skips are not minor bugs — they are locked doors.
Contrast failures. Light grey text on white looks elegant in a design mockup and is unreadable for shoppers with low vision. The WCAG AA standard requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. In audits we routinely measure body text and price labels well below that.
Unlabeled forms and checkout fields. If a form field has no proper label, a screen reader may announce only “edit text” — the shopper cannot know whether to type their name, email or card number. Checkout is where this failure costs the store money even before it costs legal exposure.
Missing structure. Headings that jump levels, pages with no landmarks, and links that say only “click here” make a store impossible to navigate by sound. Screen-reader users navigate by headings the way sighted users scan a page visually.
What remediation looks like, step by step
Remediation is a sequence, not a single fix. First, the audit: automated scans catch the mechanical issues, then manual testing — keyboard-only navigation and screen-reader passes over the home page, product pages, cart and checkout — finds what scanners miss. You receive a findings report listing each barrier, its severity, and where it lives in your theme.
Second, the fixes are made in the theme code itself: labels, focus order, contrast values, heading structure, ARIA where it is needed and removed where it is wrong. Third, the store is re-tested the same way it was audited, and the findings report is updated to show what now passes. Fourth — the step most stores skip — the fixes are protected: theme updates and new apps can quietly reintroduce barriers, which is why ongoing care exists. A one-time fix with no monitoring decays; a checked store stays defensible.
A short self-audit checklist for your store
Before you pay anyone for an audit, you can learn a lot from an hour with your own store and this checklist. It will not replace a professional audit — it covers the surface, not the code underneath — but it will show you honestly whether your store has the common barriers.
One: pick your three best-selling product pages. For each image on them, ask what a shopper learns from it, then check whether the alt text says that. If the alt text is empty, a file name, or the single word “image”, that page fails its first test. Two: open your store on your phone and try to buy your own product using only the on-screen keyboard navigation your platform offers, then repeat on a desktop with the keyboard alone — Tab to move, Enter to activate, Escape to close popups. Note every place you cannot reach or cannot escape. Three: look at your sale prices, your “add to cart” button text and your footer links in bright light. If you squint, your customers squint. Four: start your checkout as a guest and read every field label aloud. If any field’s purpose is not obvious from its label alone, a screen reader will not rescue it. Five: watch any product video with the sound off. If the point of the video disappears, so does it for a deaf shopper — captions are the fix. Six: submit your contact or newsletter form empty, on purpose. The error message should tell you exactly what to fix and where; if it only turns a box red, it fails. Seven: zoom your browser to 200 percent and scroll a product page. Text that overlaps, hides or forces sideways scrolling is a barrier, not a style choice.
If your store passes all seven, your surface is in decent shape and a professional audit becomes about depth — the code-level issues scanners and testers find underneath. If it fails several, you already know the audit will find real work, and you can plan for it on your own schedule instead of a law firm’s.
After the fixes: documentation and staying compliant
The last page of a proper audit matters more than most owners realise: the dated record. Keep the findings report, the list of what was fixed, and the re-test results together. If a demand letter ever arrives, that file is your evidence that the store was professionally checked and remediated on a known date — a materially stronger position than a store with no record at all.
Staying compliant is then a habit, not a project. Theme updates, new apps and new page sections can each reintroduce barriers silently. The practical rhythm we recommend: a light re-check after any theme change or major app install, and a scheduled review on the care plan so nothing drifts for long. Accessibility decays the same way security does — quietly, and only where nobody is looking.
The cost of fixing it now vs. the cost of fixing it later
Put the two paths side by side and the arithmetic is not close. Path one, planned: a free check, then — if it shows real risk — a fixed-price audit at a published price, fixes at a published price, done on your schedule, with the report kept on file. Path two, unplanned: a demand letter arrives, and now the same audit and the same fixes must happen anyway, except they happen alongside legal counsel, a settlement discussion, and a deadline somebody else chose. The remediation work itself is identical in both paths. What the second path adds is everything around it: your lawyer’s time, the settlement itself, the monitoring commitments claimants typically require, and the commercial cost of doing rushed work on a live store during your selling season. Owners sometimes tell us they will “deal with accessibility if it ever comes up”. That is path two, chosen in advance. The audit is the cheapest version of this problem that exists — which is exactly why we price it as a fixed, published number instead of a negotiation, and why the check that starts it is free.
Questions store owners ask us
How much does a Shopify accessibility audit cost?
Our fixed-price packages start at $495 for a full audit with a findings report, $995 for audit plus fixes, and $1,495 plus $79/month for fix plus ongoing care. Every engagement can start with the free check first.
How long does an audit and fix take?
The free check takes 48 hours. A full audit is delivered in about 5 business days; fixes depend on the findings, and priority turnaround is available on the care plan.
My store is small — am I really at risk?
Yes. Most accessibility demand letters go to small and mid-sized stores precisely because they are unlikely to have been audited. Size is not a defense; the state of your code is.
Does my theme choice matter?
Yes. Some themes ship with cleaner structure and better keyboard behaviour than others, but no theme is fully compliant out of the box — your apps, your custom sections and your content all affect the result. The audit measures your store as it actually is, not the theme’s marketing claims.
What if I have already received a demand letter?
Do not ignore it, and do not rely on a widget as your answer. Have the store audited promptly: a dated professional audit and a remediation plan in progress are the strongest practical position you can be in while your legal counsel handles the claim itself. We can prioritise the audit when a letter has already arrived.
Vellwer Agency builds and grows websites and stores — and we fix the accessibility problems other teams leave behind. Get your free accessibility check or talk to us about your project.