Shopify removes a lot of the hard parts of running a store — but accessibility isn’t one of them. A clean-looking storefront can still be unusable for someone on a screen reader or navigating by keyboard, and Shopify’s structure means the failures cluster in three predictable places: the theme, the apps you install, and the checkout. The good news is that because they’re predictable, they’re fixable. Here’s what actually breaks, and what to do about each one.

First, the stakes. Ecommerce is the most-sued category in digital accessibility litigation — by UsableNet’s count, online stores made up nearly 70% of the more than 5,000 lawsuits filed in 2025, and 64% of defendants were companies under $25 million in revenue. That’s the exact bracket most Shopify merchants live in. (This is general information, not legal advice — talk to a qualified attorney about your own exposure.)

Pitfall 1: Your theme isn’t as accessible as it looks

Even Shopify’s free flagship theme, Dawn, ships with real accessibility gaps the moment a merchant starts customizing — and premium themes are usually worse, not better. The issues we find on almost every store map directly to the most common failures on the web. WebAIM’s 2025 audit of a million home pages found low-contrast text on 79.1% of pages and missing alternative text on 55.5%; Shopify stores are no exception.

The recurring theme-level offenders:

  • Low-contrast brand colors. Light-gray “subtle” text, white type over busy product photography, and pale sale badges routinely fall under the 4.5:1 ratio that WCAG 1.4.3 requires for normal text. Designers love it; low-vision users can’t read it. Our full color contrast guide covers the thresholds.
  • Missing or useless alt text. Dawn supports alt text but doesn’t enforce it, so product galleries import with empty alt attributes or filenames like IMG_4821.jpg. Every product image needs a real description — see WCAG 1.1.1 and our alt text guide.
  • Removed focus outlines. The single most common customization mistake is a theme tweak that deletes the focus ring “because it looked ugly.” That breaks keyboard navigation and fails WCAG 2.4.7 Focus Visible. Keyboard users lose all sense of where they are on the page.
  • Variant pickers that stay silent. When a shopper selects a size or color, Dawn-style pickers update price and stock visually — but often don’t announce the change to a screen reader, and disabled/out-of-stock options confuse keyboard users. That’s a real conversion problem, not just a compliance one.

The fix isn’t a better theme; it’s manual remediation of the theme you have. Picking an accessible theme reduces the starting debt, but no theme clears WCAG on its own.

Pitfall 2: One bad app can sink the whole store

This is the Shopify-specific trap people miss. Shopify’s App Store does not review apps for accessibility before listing them, so the markup an app injects into your live storefront is entirely on you. A single widget can undo an otherwise-clean audit.

The usual suspects:

  • Spin-to-win and email popups that open as modals with no dialog role, no focus trap management, and no keyboard-accessible close button — a classic WCAG 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value failure.
  • Cookie/consent banners that cover content and can’t be dismissed without a mouse.
  • Upsell and cart-drawer apps that pull focus, fire content updates screen readers never hear, or create keyboard traps you can’t tab out of.
  • Review and “social proof” widgets that inject unlabeled buttons and star ratings as bare images.

There’s a sharper version of this risk: accessibility overlay widgets, the ones that promise instant compliance. They don’t deliver. In 2025 the FTC ordered overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million for falsely claiming its AI widget could make a website WCAG compliant, and UsableNet found that roughly a quarter of 2024 lawsuits — over 1,000 cases — named an overlay on the site as a barrier rather than a defense. Installing one can make you a bigger target. We break down the mechanics in why overlays don’t work and overlay vs. manual remediation.

The fix: audit every app that renders visible markup on the storefront. Test each one by keyboard alone — Tab, Enter, Esc — and with a screen reader. If an app traps focus or goes silent and the vendor won’t fix it, replace it. A good accessibility audit treats apps as first-class surfaces, not an afterthought.

Pitfall 3: Checkout is safer than you think — until you customize it

Here’s the part that surprises merchants: standard Shopify checkout is one of the better-handled flows on the platform, because Shopify builds and maintains it centrally and follows its own accessibility best practices for themes and storefronts. You don’t own that code, so you also don’t own most of its bugs.

The risk lives in what you add. On Shopify Plus, Checkout UI Extensions and post-purchase upsells let you inject custom components into the flow. Shopify provides accessible default building blocks — fields, buttons, banners, headings — that handle ARIA correctly. The failures happen when teams build custom markup instead:

  • Custom upsell modals with no dialog role or focus management.
  • Clickable <View> or <div> elements with no keyboard handler — fine with a mouse, invisible to keyboard users (a WCAG 2.1.1 Keyboard failure).
  • Custom form fields with no programmatic label, breaking WCAG 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions at the worst possible moment — when someone is trying to pay.

A broken checkout doesn’t just fail an audit; it loses the sale outright. Use Shopify’s provided components wherever you can, and put any custom checkout code through a real WCAG 2.1 AA review before it ships.

The fix order that actually works

You don’t have to boil the ocean. In practice, the highest-leverage sequence for a Shopify store is:

  1. Fix contrast and alt text first — they’re the most common, the easiest to verify, and the most cited in demand letters.
  2. Restore focus visibility and test the keyboard path through menus, variant pickers, and cart.
  3. Audit and remediate every storefront app, removing overlays entirely.
  4. Review any custom checkout extensions against WCAG 2.1 AA.

That’s the spine of how Curbcut approaches Shopify work — manual remediation of the real code and content, no widgets, no shortcuts. For the complete platform playbook, see our Shopify ADA compliance guide, and if you’re weighing the broader risk, how to avoid an ADA lawsuit puts it in context.

Want to know which of these are live on your store right now? Run a free scan — it surfaces the theme and app issues plaintiffs look for, in plain language.