Is Shopify ADA compliant?

WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the standard used to judge whether a website works for people with disabilities. Shopify publishes accessibility conformance reports, which say how each of its products measures up to WCAG. They are listed at shopify.com/accessibility (page last updated July 7, 2025).

The checkout report is honest about its gaps. Examples it lists include focus outlines that are faint or missing, some PayPal, Venmo and Amazon Pay controls, and an address search that is hard to reach with a screen reader. You cannot fix these. You can check your own brand colours and logo in checkout, and link Shopify's report in your accessibility statement.

Everything a shopper sees before checkout is yours. That includes:

• your theme and any code you or a developer changed
• your colour choices in the theme editor
• every app that adds something to your storefront, such as pop-ups, reviews and chat
• product images, videos, descriptions, size charts and pages

Themes in the Shopify Theme Store must pass accessibility checks when they are submitted, including a Lighthouse accessibility score of at least 90 and keyboard access to menus. Those checks do not cover what you add later. WebAIM's 2026 scan of one million home pages found Shopify home pages averaged 75.1 detectable errors, against 56.1 for all sites (February 2026).

Fix what shoppers hit most, starting with the path to checkout, and keep a dated record. In short: write alt text (a short description of an image for people who cannot see it) for every product image, fix low-contrast colours in your theme settings, test the purchase with only a keyboard, label every form field, review your apps, and publish an accessibility statement.

The full step-by-step list, with the admin pages to open, is in our Shopify ADA compliance guide.

In practice, any US business that sells to the public online should assume its site is covered. The ADA does not mention websites, and the Justice Department has no technical web rule for private businesses. Courts have filled the gap, and settlements measure sites against WCAG 2.1 AA. Federal courts disagree on stores with no physical shop, but online-only stores are sued too. Details are in our ADA website compliance guide.

A barrier that stops a person with a disability from using your store the way others can. The Justice Department's 2022 web guidance names the common ones:

• poor colour contrast
• colour used alone to show meaning
• images with no text alternative
• videos with no captions
• form fields with no label
• controls that only work with a mouse

Yes. EcomBack counted 3,948 ADA website lawsuits in 2025, and 46.6% of the suits in the first half of 2026 named a Shopify store (EcomBack, 2026 mid-year report). Shopify's own reports do not protect you, because the claims are about your storefront.

For accessibility, the main downside is control over checkout. You cannot change checkout code, so you rely on Shopify to fix the gaps in its report. The upside is the same thing: you do not have to build or maintain an accessible checkout yourself, and Shopify publishes how it tests it.

The other common problem is apps. Many Shopify stores run several apps that add code to every page, and you cannot always edit it. Test each one, and ask vendors to fix what they own.