Shopify themes share a small number of recurring accessibility defects, because most paid themes are forks of Dawn or of the same handful of commercial templates. The cart icon with no accessible name, the variant <select> with no label, the quantity stepper below the minimum tap-target size, and grey-on-white body copy under 4.5:1 appear again and again.
This checker loads your storefront in a real headless Chromium with your theme JavaScript running, then runs axe-core against WCAG 2.1 A and AA rules on a representative set of pages — homepage, a collection, a product, cart, contact and policies — rather than the homepage alone.
The free scan reports counts, the severity split and whether an overlay widget is installed. The paid report names the Liquid file, gives the offending markup and the CSS selector, and tells you what to change.
What this scan checks first
These are the rules that appear most often in filed accessibility complaints. Each links to the fix for Shopify.
- Images missing alternative text — 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A)
- Links with no discernible text — 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) (Level A)
- Buttons with no accessible name — 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (Level A)
- Text colour does not contrast enough with its background — 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) (Level AA)
- Form inputs with no label — 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A)
- No way to skip repeated navigation — 2.4.1 Bypass Blocks (Level A)
What automated testing cannot tell you
A scan decides what is decidable from the markup. It can prove an image has no alt attribute. It cannot tell you whether the alt text you wrote actually describes the photograph. It can measure contrast; it cannot judge whether your error messages make sense to someone using a screen reader under time pressure.
We say so on every report rather than at the bottom of a terms page, because the opposite claim is what earned a competitor a $1,000,000 FTC order in January 2025.