Shopify ADA Compliance and Accessibility
Making your Shopify website ADA compliant is a matter of making real accessibility edits to your code and content.
There is no app or widget that can automatically make your Shopify store accessible.
There are no settings in your Shopify theme that you can turn on to instantly make your website accessible.
ADA
Under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), there is nothing specific that says how to make a website ADA compliant, nor is there anything that explicitly states that a website must be made ADA compliant.
Nevertheless plaintiffs’ lawyers are suing thousands of website owners (with Shopify store owners their most frequent target) under the general interpretation that Title III of the ADA applies to places of public accommodation and websites have been generally interpreted to be places of public accommodation.
As such, for the last 8+ years, plaintiffs’ lawyers have been sent demand letters and filed complaints in state and federal court against website owners.
The best practices to make your website be considered ADA compliant are to make your website WCAG 2.1 AA conformant (or WCAG 2.2 AA) and publish an accessibility statement with at least one method of contact.
WCAG
99.9% of the work is WCAG conformance.
WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These are the technical standards that set out voluntary requirements for web accessibility.
Those requirements (called success criteria) tell us what considerations we need to have in place for web accessibility.
Things like closed captions for videos and alt text for meaningful images.
Once you’ve got those two down, add about 48 other things (some of which are technically advanced and require a developer to make the edits) that need to be taken in consideration.
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What happens is plaintiffs’ lawyers look for certain technical accessibility issues and then if they find one or a few on a website, they will sue that website owner.
Next Steps
With this background, here are the practical next steps along with your options.
- Get an accessibility audit from a reputable company (like mine, Accessible.org)
- Fix the issues identified in the audit report
- Have the issues validated (to make sure they’ve resolved the issue)
- Publish an accessibility statement
- Get documentation of accessibility or user testing
The above will cost $2,500–$5,500 for most Shopify store owners:
- Audit $1,250 — $2,500
- Fixes $1,000-$2,000
- Validation $500 — $1,000
The cost varies on:
- how complex your website is
- how many pages are in scope
- how many issues there are to fix
- who you source work to
That fixes cost bullet point might seem low if you’ve purchase development work lately, but our Accessibility Tracker platform makes issue fixes easier because it has AI inside the dashboard to help with each fix. You can watch this in action with the YouTube video below.
Summary
This is how you really make your Shopify store ADA compliant (and, in effect, flatten your risk of being sued).
The formula again is audit + fixes + validation = WCAG conformance = ADA compliant.
Then you have to make sure it stays that way. It’s very easy to undo all of the hard work that went into WCAG conformance.
Also remember that you can go the extra mile with user testing and maintaining documentation of all of your accessibility investments.
P.S. If you’re in a hurry to reduce your risk right now, my ADA Compliance Course shows you how to make imperfect, but immediate fixes to the most critical issues that plaintiffs’ lawyers claim the most.
