Ecommerce Accessibility Remediation

No. Shopify's checkout and admin are built with accessibility in mind, but the storefront is yours: the theme, the apps you install, the images you upload and the copy you write. A theme can pass most criteria on day one and fail a dozen after a year of customisation and app installs. Responsibility for the store rests with the merchant, which is why remediation covers the theme, the apps and the content rules together.

No. An overlay is a script that adjusts the page after it loads. It cannot add alt text the catalog never had, cannot make a custom checkout field keyboard operable and cannot stop a theme update from undoing a fix. Stores running an overlay are still sued, and in January 2025 the FTC ordered one overlay vendor to pay one million dollars over claims that its tool could make any website WCAG compliant. We remove overlays rather than install them.

After the audit, by the findings. The audit produces a list of what fails, where and how often, and the quote is built from that list: how many templates, which checkout steps, which apps, how many images need describing. A store with a sound theme and one bad checkout step is a different job from a store with a decade of customisation. There is no list price on this site because no two stores fail in the same places.

The audit takes about two weeks for a typical store, including the manual screen reader pass. The fixes depend on the list, but checkout and forms go first and are usually live within the first weeks, because that is where a blocked customer costs an order. A full run to the conformance report on a mid-sized store is a matter of months, not a year, and fixes land throughout rather than at the end.

No. Most fixes are corrections to markup that already exists: a label on a field, a role on a button, a visible focus state, alt text on an image, a contrast change in the stylesheet. They add nothing to the page weight. The one thing that does slow stores is an overlay script, which loads on every page and rewrites the DOM after render, and remediation removes it.

WCAG 2.2 is the current edition, published by the W3C as a Recommendation and last updated in December 2024. It keeps every 2.1 criterion but one and adds nine, four of which matter on most stores: a focus indicator that a sticky header cannot hide, a keyboard alternative to dragging, larger targets for buttons and links, and sign-in that does not depend on retyping a code. We remediate to 2.2 AA, so a store fixed to 2.1 is re-checked against the new criteria.

If you sell to businesses, universities or public bodies in the US, buyers increasingly ask for a VPAT, the standard template for reporting conformance. If you sell to consumers, a conformance report serves the same purpose for your counsel and for anyone who asks. We produce the WCAG 2.2 AA conformance report as part of every remediation and can format it as a VPAT on request.

Talk to your attorney first, and in parallel get the store audited, because the findings list is what both the settlement and the fix will be built on. Most complaints name the same handful of failures, and showing concrete remediation under way changes the conversation. We can start the audit the same week and provide the evidence your counsel needs. This is a description of how we work, not legal advice.

US courts have been divided on whether a web-only business is a place of public accommodation under Title III, and the answer has depended on the circuit. The question has not slowed the filings: thousands of website suits were filed in federal court in 2025, most against retailers. The safer position is a store that conforms to WCAG 2.2 AA and a report that shows it. This is not legal advice; your counsel can say how the law applies to you.

Yes. On Luma the work is in the PHTML templates, the knockout checkout and the UI components; on Hyvä it is in the Alpine.js components and Tailwind theme, which are easier to correct and keep correct. Adobe Commerce stores on Cloud and PWA Studio storefronts are covered the same way. We have built and maintained Magento stores since 2008, so the fixes go in where the next upgrade will not remove them.

We test them like everything else: the review widget, the chat, the consent banner, the payment buttons. Where the failure is in the vendor's code we document it with the criterion it fails, report it to the vendor and track the response. If nothing moves, we recommend a replacement that passes. The conformance report lists these as known exceptions with their status, which is what an honest report looks like.

Yes. The Act has applied to ecommerce services sold into the EU since June 2025 and its technical standard, EN 301 549, points at WCAG 2.1 AA, which 2.2 AA includes. A US store that sells to EU customers is in scope, so a remediation to 2.2 AA covers both the US exposure and the European one. We note the EU-specific requirements, such as the accessibility statement, in the report. This is not legal advice.

Three things, all set up before we leave: content rules for the team that uploads products and writes pages, fixes made in the component library rather than on single pages so new pages inherit them, and a check in every release against the regression suite. The annual re-audit catches what slipped through. Stores on our ongoing support have all of this done as part of the retainer.

Either. Many stores have us run the audit and the retests and hand the findings to their own team, with pull requests reviewed by us; others have us make every fix. The findings list is written so that a developer who has never read WCAG can act on it, with the criterion, the location, the fix and the test for each one.