How accessible are Shopify stores? We scanned 69

We picked 69 Shopify stores at random and ran the same automated accessibility checks our reports use on four pages of each: home, a collection, a product and the cart. 97% had at least one failure an automated test can detect.

This is a technical accessibility assessment, not legal advice, and automated testing cannot establish ADA compliance.

Key findings

• 97% of stores had at least one detectable failure of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) on the four pages we checked. The typical store failed 5 different checks, with 62 failing elements in all.
• Low color contrast was the most common problem, on 88% of stores: text too light against its background for many people to read.
• 46% of stores had images with no text alternative, so a screen reader user hears nothing, or a file name. 6% had alt text that was just a file name or a word like "image".
• The pages that make the sale weren't cleaner. 91% of product pages and 90% of cart pages had a detectable failure.
• 11 stores had an accessibility widget installed. 100% of them still had detectable failures, because a widget runs on top of the page and leaves its code as it was. What regulators have said about widgets.

The most common problems, and where to fix them in Shopify

Share of the 69 stores with each problem on at least one of the four pages.

Most of these live in the theme and in apps, not in Shopify's own checkout. Some you can fix yourself in the Shopify admin: alt text, colors, and apps you don't need. The rest need a developer or the app's maker. Step by step: ADA issues on Shopify and how to fix them.

What this does and doesn't mean

• A failure here isn't a legal finding. Automated checks show where a page falls short of specific WCAG criteria. They can't say whether a store would win or lose a legal claim.
• Automated checks only find part of the problem. Keyboard use, screen reader flow and the quality of alt text need a person to test. These numbers are a floor, not the full picture.
• These are the problems letters tend to list. Demand letters and complaints commonly cite missing alt text, unlabeled buttons and links, and low contrast, the same problems that top this table. What to do if you got a letter.

How we did it

• Sample: we shuffled the .com and .us domains in the Tranco top-1M list (list V349N, a research ranking of popular websites), skipped the top 1,000, and checked 3,200 domains in random order. We kept 130 that were live Shopify stores selling at least one product. We counted a store when at least three of its four pages loaded; 69 did. Most of the rest were cut off by Shopify's limit on how many pages one visitor can load in a short time: it hit the stores that came up later in our random order, not any particular kind of store.
• Pages: the home page, the first collection linked from it, a product from the store's own product list, and the cart (269 pages in all).
• Test: axe-core 4.13.0 with the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 level A and AA rules, in a desktop browser (1280 × 800) with reduced motion on, so animations settle before contrast is measured. Alt text quality is our own check for file names and generic words.
• When: September 30, 2026.
• Privacy: we don't name any store. Only totals are published.