Shopify Accessibility Audit: Your Theme, Your Apps, Their Checkout

What We Keep Finding

Shopify stores split into three territories. Your theme, which you fully control. Your installed apps, which inject their own markup, popups, and review widgets, often unlabeled. And the checkout, where the structure has been Shopify's since checkout.liquid was sunset in August 2025, while the fonts, colors and layout stay yours on every plan through the checkout editor.

That middle sentence is the one most merchants have backwards, so it is worth being exact. The behavior of checkout is not yours to break or to fix. The branding is, on any plan, which means you can fail a contrast rule in there without writing a line of code, and you can fix it the same way. And on Plus, checkout extensions let you or an app developer ship a custom control straight into the payment step. That was not possible two years ago, and it is a genuinely new way to make checkout worse.

One good piece of news about your theme, and one caveat that comes with it. Every theme in Shopify's own Theme Store has to pass a published accessibility bar before it gets listed. The bar covers keyboard access including dropdown navigation, a visible focus state, 4.5:1 contrast for body text and 3:1 for large text and non-text parts, and touch targets of at least 24 by 24 pixels. On top of that it wants an average automated accessibility score of 90 across the home, collection and product pages. So a Theme Store theme has been reviewed. A theme bought elsewhere has not, and that changes where we expect to find things.

The caveat is the part Shopify does not claim and other people do. An automated score of 90 is not conformance, and the tool producing it prints its own warning that it detects a subset of issues and does not guarantee anything. So the bar is real, it is better than most marketplaces manage, and it is not the same as a store that works. The pattern we keep finding is a decent theme buried under app clutter. The quick-view modal that traps keyboard focus, the reviews widget with unlabeled stars, the popup that reads before the page does. One audit sorts the pile.