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Will the Accessibility Toolkit make my Shopify store ADA compliant?

No. The Accessibility Toolkit does not make your store ADA, WCAG or EAA compliant, and no app can do that for you. Your store's accessibility depends on your theme's code and your own content: product images, videos, forms, colors and headings.

The app helps in two ways. The widget gives shoppers tools to adjust your pages, and the audit (Advanced plan) finds some problems on a page so you can fix them. You make the fixes in your theme and your content.

What the laws and guidelines say​

  • ADA (United States): The US Department of Justice says the ADA's requirements apply to the websites of businesses that are open to the public. It has no regulation that sets a detailed technical standard for these websites, and it points to WCAG as helpful guidance. Its 2024 rule that adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA covers state and local governments, not private businesses. Read the Department of Justice guidance.
  • EAA (European Union): The European Accessibility Act applies to e-commerce services offered to consumers in the EU from 28 June 2025, through each EU country's own law. Very small businesses that provide services are exempt from its rules for those services: this means fewer than 10 staff, and a yearly turnover or balance sheet total of €2 million or less. EU rules decide how staff and turnover are counted, and linked businesses can count too. Stores that sell products the Act covers, such as computers, phones or e-readers, have separate duties.
  • WCAG: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C. The current version is WCAG 2.2.

Whether a law applies to your store, and what it asks of you, depends on where you are and where you sell. This page is not legal advice. If you need a firm answer, ask a lawyer.

What the widget does​

The widget adds an Accessibility Menu to your storefront. Shoppers can make text bigger, change line height and letter spacing, switch to the OpenDyslexic font, change color saturation, highlight links and headings, have text read aloud, pause animations and more. Their choices apply only in their own browser.

The widget does not change your theme's code. It can't add missing image descriptions (alt text), caption your videos, label your forms or fix the color contrast in your theme. You need to make those fixes in your theme and your content.

What the audit does​

The audit is on the Advanced plan. In the app, open AI audit and scan, check the address in Target URL (your store's homepage is filled in for you) and click Run audit.

The menu name says "AI", but the audit does not use AI. It is an automated rule check: it loads the page in a browser and tests it with axe-core, the open-source testing engine from Deque. It runs axe's default rules. They check some (not all) WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA requirements and two of the Level AA requirements added in WCAG 2.1. They also include axe "best practice" checks that WCAG does not require. The audit does not check requirements added in WCAG 2.2, or Level AAA.

When the scan finishes you get:

  • Axe health score: a rough signal, not a compliance percentage. It compares the number of axe rules that passed with the number that failed. Each rule counts once, even if it fails on many elements, so if a rule fails on 10 elements and you fix 9, the score doesn't change. A rule that passes on some elements and fails on others counts as both passed and failed. All rules count the same, even if their impact is different. Rules that don't apply to the page, and checks that need a person to confirm, are left out. A page can score 100% and still have problems that only a person can find.
  • The issues found: each issue's impact (critical, serious, moderate or minor) and the number of elements affected. Click View details to open the Audit details page. There, each issue has a link that explains the rule, and its own View details link shows the affected elements and their HTML. Audit coverage on that page also shows how many checks need a person to confirm ("incomplete").
  • Download PDF: a report you can share with your theme developer. The PDF on the results screen lists the issues only. The Download PDF button on the Audit details page, or the download icon in Recent audits, also lists each affected element and its HTML. Recent audits keeps your last 50 scans.

Each scan checks one page. To check product pages, collection pages and other pages, run a scan for each one.

Automated checks find only some of the problems. In a study by Deque (the company that makes axe), its automated tools found about 57% of the issues in its audits; the rest needed testing by people. This number is about Deque's tools and audits, not about how much our audit finds on your store. The W3C says evaluation tools can't decide whether a site is accessible; they can only help. The Department of Justice also warns that a "clean" report from an automated checker does not necessarily mean everything is accessible.

What to do next​

  1. Fix what the audit finds. Start with critical and serious issues. Most fixes are in your theme code or your content, so your theme developer can help.
  2. Check your content. Add alt text to product and banner images, captions to videos and labels to form fields, and make sure text stands out clearly from its background.
  3. Test by hand. Use your store with only the keyboard (Tab and Enter): can you reach the menu, open a product and add it to the cart? Then try a screen reader, such as VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, or NVDA on Windows.
  4. Let shoppers report problems. Publish an accessibility statement with a contact email. On the Advanced plan the app can host one on your store. In the app's Settings, under Statement generator, turn on Host the generated statement on my store, check the Contact email (it starts as your store's email) and save. Then open Preview statement page and read it. You can change only the company name and the email; the rest of the text is fixed. If any part is not true for your store, turn the generator off, publish your own statement page and link to it: set Statement type to External and add the page's address in Statement URL. On the Free and Basic plans, the widget's Accessibility statement link opens our own statement page on appifycommerce.com, not a statement about your store, and you can't change that link on those plans.
  5. Check again after changes. Run the audit again when you change themes, add apps or redesign pages.

Note: For advice about your legal position, ask a lawyer. For a full check of your store, ask an accessibility specialist for a manual audit. If you have questions about the app, email us at support@appifycommerce.com.

Get accessibility app for Shopify from here Accessibility Toolkit