Shopify accessibility and the European Accessibility Act

EAA Comply · Updated 27 July 2026 · 7 min read

Shopify does a lot of the groundwork for you. It does not make your store accessible, and the gap between those two statements is where almost every finding in a Shopify audit lives.

This page sets out what the platform actually covers, what stays your responsibility as the merchant, and the barriers we find over and over on real Shopify stores. If you would rather skip to the answer for your own shop, a free scan takes about a minute.

What Shopify covers, and where it stops

Shopify requires themes in its Theme Store to meet accessibility standards before they are published. Its own guidance to theme developers names keyboard accessibility — navigating and operating the whole theme with the keyboard alone — adequate colour contrast, and a highly visible, consistent focus style.

That is a real baseline and it is better than most platforms offer. But it applies to the theme as submitted. Three things happen after that point, and all three are yours.

The compliance point. Under the European Accessibility Act, the obligation sits with the service provider offering the online shop — that is you, not Shopify. A compliant theme is a good starting position. It is not a defence on its own, and it is not an accessibility statement.

The barriers we find most often on Shopify stores

Three of these come from Shopify’s own guidance to its partners, which is worth knowing: the platform is not pretending these are rare.

1. The cart drawer that opens without telling anyone

You click “Add to cart”, a drawer slides in from the right, and keyboard focus stays on the button you just pressed. A sighted user sees the drawer. A screen reader user hears nothing, tabs forward, and lands somewhere unrelated. Shopify names this as the first thing to fix on a product page, and it is the single most common serious finding we see on modern Shopify themes.

2. Sale prices that only exist visually

A struck-through original price next to a red sale price is obvious on screen and meaningless to a screen reader, which reads two numbers with no relationship between them. The fix is small — visually hidden “Regular price” and “Sale price” labels before each value — and it is one Shopify explicitly recommends.

3. Colour swatches that cannot be reached or understood

Two separate failures usually appear together. Custom-styled variant radios hidden with display:none remove the control from the keyboard and the accessibility tree entirely, so the variant cannot be selected at all without a mouse. And distinguishing variants by colour alone excludes colourblind shoppers unless the name is available as text.

4. Announcement bars, popups and cookie banners that trap focus

Anything that overlays the page has to be escapable and has to return focus where it came from. Discount popups and consent banners added by apps frequently do neither, which turns them into a hard stop rather than an interruption.

5. Checkout that works, until it does not

Shopify’s hosted checkout is the part you control least and the part that matters most. What we test is whether your customisations, apps and any checkout extensions leave every field labelled, every error announced, and every step reachable by keyboard. A store that fails at checkout fails at the only screen that produces revenue.

6. Product images with no alt text

Shopify gives you an alt text field on every media item. It is empty by default and stays empty on most catalogues we look at. On a 400-product store this is the largest single count of failures and also the cheapest to fix, because it is data entry rather than code.

Apps are the part nobody audits

A typical Shopify store runs somewhere between five and twenty apps. Each one that renders something on the storefront is code you did not write, did not review, and cannot easily patch. Reviews widgets, currency selectors, chat bubbles, back-in-stock forms and cookie consent tools are the usual suspects.

We test the page as your customer receives it, apps included, because that is what a regulator or a claimant would look at. Where the failure is inside a third-party app we say so plainly, and the fix plan says whether it is configurable, replaceable, or something you need to raise with the vendor. Pretending an app failure is your developer’s problem would waste your money.

Four things you can fix yourself this week

None of that requires us, and doing it before an audit means you pay to find the problems you could not have found yourself.

What an audit looks like on a Shopify store

We test your real pages — home, a collection, a product with variants, cart and the checkout path — on desktop and mobile, with axe-core plus a manual pass by a person. You get every finding with the exact element and Liquid template it sits in, ordered by what is blocking a purchase first, plus your accessibility statement written against WCAG 2.1 AA and ready to publish. That is the €149 report. If you want the fixes written out as code your developer or a Shopify Expert can paste in, that is €290.

What we will not tell you. We will not tell you an app can make your store compliant, because none can. And if your store is a heavily customised headless build on Hydrogen with a custom component library, we will say up front that a specialist consultancy is the better fit rather than sell you a report that under-serves it.

Questions we get asked

Does using a Shopify theme make my store EAA compliant?

No. Shopify requires Theme Store themes to meet accessibility standards at submission, which is a good starting position, but the obligation under the European Accessibility Act sits with you as the service provider. Your customisations, your apps and your product content all sit outside that review, and they are where most failures are found.

Will an accessibility app from the Shopify App Store fix this?

No overlay or widget fixes the underlying code, and installing one does not remove your obligation. In 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission required the largest overlay vendor to pay $1 million over claims that its product could make any website compliant. Fix the theme and the content instead.

Do you audit the Shopify checkout?

Yes, we test the checkout path as your customer experiences it. Shopify hosts and controls the core checkout, so what we assess is whether your customisations, checkout extensions and apps leave every field labelled, every error announced and every step reachable by keyboard.

How long does a Shopify audit take?

You get the report in five to seven working days. The free scan of your homepage comes back in a few minutes and tells you whether a full audit is worth paying for.

My store is small. Does the EAA actually apply to me?

Microenterprises providing services, meaning under ten staff and under two million euro annual turnover, are exempt from the EAA service obligations, but the exemption is narrower than most people assume and is applied per member state. If you sell into Germany you also face a separate risk from competitor warning letters, which is not affected by that exemption at all.

Scan your Shopify store free

We check your live storefront and email you the barriers we find. If your theme is in decent shape, we will tell you that instead of selling you a report.

Run a free accessibility scan

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