Page selection
We read sitemap.xml first, following a sitemap index one level deep, and fall back to crawling same-origin links from the homepage. From that pool we choose a representative set rather than the first twenty URLs: homepage, a collection, a product, cart, checkout entry, contact, search, account and policy pages, then a second product and collection, then the shortest remaining paths.
The free scan covers 5 pages, the paid audit up to 20. Redirects are followed to the canonical origin, and every hop is re-checked against private address ranges.
Testing
Each page loads in headless Chromium at 1366×900 with your theme JavaScript running, so anything rendered client-side is tested as a visitor receives it. We block third-party analytics to keep load inside a 15-second ceiling, then run axe-core with the rule tags wcag2a, wcag2aa, wcag21a, wcag21aa.
A page that times out or errors is recorded and skipped; it does not fail the scan. Skipped pages are listed in the report appendix.
Overlay detection
We check for the script hosts and DOM markers of accessiBe, UserWay, AudioEye, EqualWeb and two smaller vendors. Detection is reported with the evidence that produced it, so you can verify it yourself.
Ranking
An unranked list of 300 findings is not actionable. Each finding gets a priority score:
- Severity: critical 40, serious 25, moderate 10, minor 3.
- +30 if the rule appears frequently in filed US accessibility complaints.
- +15 if the issue is present on more than half the pages scanned, +7 if on more than one.
- +10 if the fix is a known one-line or theme-setting change.
The top 10 get full treatment in the report — plain-English description, WCAG criterion, offending markup, selector, theme location, code example. The rest are listed compactly.
Fix guidance
Instructions for 47 rules are written by hand against real Shopify and WooCommerce theme structure. They are not the axe-core help text reworded. Where a rule has no hand-written entry, the report says so and links the axe reference rather than inventing advice.
What this does not do
Automated testing detects roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues. It can prove an image has no alt attribute; it cannot judge whether your alt text describes the photograph. It can measure contrast; it cannot tell you whether your checkout error messages are comprehensible. It does not perform screen-reader testing, keyboard walkthroughs, or cognitive-load assessment.
We do not certify anything, and we do not sell a widget that claims to. In January 2025 the FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1,000,000 over claims that its AI overlay could make websites meet WCAG.
Tooling
axe-core by Deque Systems, licensed MPL-2.0, driven by Playwright Chromium. Reports are generated by printing the report page itself, so the PDF and the web version cannot drift apart.