Is my Shopify store a target for an accessibility lawsuit?

Shopify runs the platform. The theme, the apps and the content are yours, and that is where most of the problems live.

The numbers

In 2025, plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in US federal courts (Seyfarth Shaw, Mar 25, 2026). Counting state courts, one tracker puts the total at 3,948, and 33.4% of the sued sites ran on Shopify (EcomBack, 2025 annual report).

This is not a big-company problem. In the first half of 2025, 69% of the defendants were e-commerce sites, and only 36% had revenue above US$25 million (UsableNet, Aug 4, 2025).

On the Shopify forums, store owners say the same thing in plain words: "We do not have money for a settlement or lawyer" (Shopify Community, Aug 23, 2024).

Why Shopify stores show up

Shopify hosts the store and the checkout. Everything the visitor sees before the checkout comes from the theme, the apps you installed and the content you wrote. A theme can ship buttons with only an icon and no name, product images with no text alternative, and colors that fail contrast on sale badges. Apps add pop-ups, carousels and review widgets, often built after the page loads, with JavaScript.

None of this is visible to someone using a mouse. The store looks fine. A screen reader hears "button, button, link" with no idea what each one does.

What doesn't fix it: an overlay. In the same 2025 data, 24.9% of the sued sites already had an accessibility widget installed (EcomBack). And the FTC ordered one widget vendor to pay US$1 million for claiming its tool made any site WCAG compliant (FTC, Apr 22, 2025).

What you can check on your theme

SiteMerit opens the page you give us in a real browser, lets the theme and the apps run their JavaScript, and checks the page as it actually exists. On a store page, the full report shows:

• Text color contrast, including text that only appears after the page loads.
• Accessible names for fields, links and buttons, so an icon button is not just "button".
• Image text alternatives, page regions (landmarks), ARIA attributes and the declared language.
• Other axe-core findings, with the rule, its impact and how many elements it hit. They take no points, and the report says so.
• What ran on the page: Shopify named by the server's answer, and the third-party domains your apps called, each with the evidence that revealed it.

Every finding carries the evidence we observed and a code (E1, E2) that the fix guide cites. For each failed check, the fix guide says what happens, why it matters and how to fix it, and names the technology the fix applies to when the evidence shows it, such as the theme or an app.

What an automated check can't tell you

We detect risk signals, with evidence. We don't certify compliance, and no automated tool honestly can. Automated checks find the mechanical failures. They can't tell whether the page makes sense when read aloud, or whether a person using a keyboard can finish a purchase.

Two more limits, said up front. Each report covers one page, the address you give us; audit your home and your best-selling product page separately. And the checkout runs on Shopify's side, so it is not part of what we audit.

If a demand letter already arrived, talk to a lawyer first. This report helps you and your developer see what to fix. It is not a legal opinion.

Why these failures stay invisible on screen: the accessibility problems you can't see

It runs 8 checks on your page, 2 per area, including image text alternatives and the declared language. The full report runs all 45 checks in a real browser, with evidence and a fix guide, for US$ 29.70, once. Your card is charged only when the report is delivered.