By platform · BigCommerce
BigCommerce Puts the Hard Part Behind a Wall
You control the storefront, whichever of the two frameworks you are on. The checkout is a hosted component, and changing it is a development project rather than a setting.
Last reviewed August 30, 2026
For store owners and agencies running BigCommerce who need the storefront to hold up under review.
The first question on BigCommerce is which storefront you are running, because the answer changes the testing job completely. Stencil is the long-standing Handlebars theme framework and Cornerstone is its reference theme. Catalyst is the newer framework built on Next.js, with a reference design of its own, and it is what BigCommerce points new builds at. A React storefront and a Handlebars theme fail in different ways. Ask before you scope anything.
The second half is the checkout, which is hosted whichever framework you chose. You have real control over the storefront and much less over checkout, so the order of work is settled for you. Fix everything you own, then find out exactly what changing the rest would take.
What breaks on BigCommerce
The failures we find most often on this platform, and the rule each one breaks.
Product option swatches with no accessible name
Color and size swatches are commonly rendered as styled labels or plain divs, so a screen reader announces a value with no indication of what choosing it selects, or whether it already is selected.
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value
Faceted search filters that update silently
Applying a filter re-renders the product grid and announces nothing, so a screen reader user has no idea the results changed and no idea how many are left.
4.1.3 Status Messages
Quick view modals built from theme markup
The pattern rarely holds focus while it is open or returns focus when it closes, which strands a keyboard user somewhere behind the overlay with no obvious way back.
2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap
Cart quantity steppers below the target minimum
The plus and minus controls in most Stencil themes are small and sit close together, and it is the combination that fails. A small target on its own can pass under the spacing exception. A small target with another small target right beside it cannot.
2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum)
Sale badges and stock states carried by color
A red price or a green in-stock dot with no text alternative means nothing to anybody who cannot distinguish the color, and nothing at all to a screen reader.
1.4.1 Use of Color
Product images with file name alt text
Bulk imports drop the file name straight into the alt field, so a screen reader reads out a string of numbers and hyphens where the product description should be.
1.1.1 Non-text Content
The plugin question, answered
BigCommerce has an app marketplace rather than a plugin ecosystem, and the accessibility category is thin. Most of what is listed there is an overlay, and the useful work happens in the theme files instead.
BigCommerce does publish accessibility guidance for Stencil theme developers, and what it leaves out is the more useful half. It covers keyboard access, color contrast and aria-label. It says nothing about focus indicators, nothing about forms, and nothing about target size, which are three of the six failures above. A theme developer who followed that document to the letter was never told about any of them.
Stencil CLI and theme customization
The local development toolchain for editing BigCommerce themes.
- What it does
- It gives you direct access to the Handlebars templates and the SCSS, which is where nearly every fixable problem on this page lives, and one template file usually controls every product page at once.
- What it cannot
- It does not reach the hosted checkout, so the last few screens of the purchase flow stay outside whatever you fix here.
Optimized One-Page Checkout
The default hosted checkout that every plan gets.
- What it does
- It is a single flow BigCommerce maintains rather than one your theme developer assembled, so it does not inherit whatever the theme did around it.
- What it cannot
- We have not tested it against the standard ourselves, and BigCommerce publishes nothing about its accessibility either, so treat both of us as silent rather than reassuring. Changing its markup means rebuilding the front end with the Checkout SDK, which is a development project rather than a setting. BigCommerce's own SDK documentation names no plan requirement and its open-source checkout front end points the same way, so do not assume a tier gate until somebody at BigCommerce confirms one for your account.
Overlay widgets (accessiBe, UserWay, AudioEye and the rest)
A script you paste into your template that draws a toolbar for visitors and claims to repair your pages automatically as they load.
- What it does
- The toolbar half is real. Bigger text, higher contrast, adjusted spacing and a reading guide are preferences some visitors use, and the field's own reference document on overlays says a non-trivial array of accessibility problems can genuinely be repaired this way.
- What it cannot
- It does not change the markup your server sends, and the categories it handles worst are the ones that decide whether a site works at all. Text alternatives, form labels and error handling, and keyboard access. More than 5,000 US digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025, and the firm that compiles that dataset reads the filings the same way every year, which is that widgets do not materially reduce legal risk. Our overlays page has the documented record.
What to actually do
- Run a scan on a category page, a product page and the cart. Between them those three cover most of the storefront's patterns.
- Fix the theme templates first, because a single template file usually controls every product page you have.
- Check that every product option control announces both what it is and what selecting it does.
- Add a live region to the faceted search so filter results get announced instead of appearing in silence.
- Walk the whole purchase path with the keyboard, from category to confirmation, and note the exact point where the hosted checkout takes over.
- Find out what your plan and your budget permit on checkout before you promise anybody a fix there.
On themes and templates
Cornerstone, the Stencil default, is a reasonable starting point and better than most marketplace themes. BigCommerce publishes techniques showing how Cornerstone satisfies WCAG 2.1 across levels, and it carefully stops short of claiming a level for the theme itself, which is the right thing to do and worth copying when somebody quotes a level at you. You will find secondhand claims that Cornerstone meets Level A. BigCommerce does not say that anywhere, and Level A leaves out every AA criterion that costs money, contrast and visible focus and target size among them. Third-party themes vary enormously, and a theme sold as accessible is making a claim against a bar nobody published.
One honest limit
The hosted checkout is the honest limit here. We can tell you exactly what fails inside it and what a conformant version would look like, and changing it means rebuilding the front end with the Checkout SDK. Most stores will not do that for one contrast failure, and that is a reasonable decision to make deliberately with the facts in front of you rather than by accident six months later.
Keep reading
Other platforms
BigCommerce
We test all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules on your BigCommerce site, with an expert review and a real blind screen-reader user on your key journeys. Every finding screenshotted and mapped to its fix. $499, report in 5 business days.