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The EAA accessibility checklist for Shopify, WooCommerce & WordPress stores

A plain-language, platform-by-platform fix list for store owners. What your theme ships broken, which checkout flows regulators actually cite, why one-click "accessibility apps" are a liability, and what you can fix yourself today.

21 June 2026

13 min read

Ravid, Webply

There's a comfortable lie a lot of store owners tell themselves: "I'm on Shopify, so accessibility is handled."

It isn't. And the platforms themselves are the first to say so. Shopify states plainly that no theme is fully accessible out of the box. Its own theme requirements only cover a fraction of the WCAG success criteria. WooCommerce hit a real milestone in 2025 — but with a catch most store owners don't realise applies to them.

Here's the rule that ties all three platforms together, and the one sentence to take away if you read nothing else: the EAA makes you — the merchant — responsible for the whole store. Your theme, your customizations, your installed apps, your product content. The platform gives you a foundation. What you build on top of it is on you.

This guide walks the shared failures first (the ones regulators actually cite), then the platform-specific traps for Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress.

What's yours to fix vs. what the platform covers

This is why a generic "is Shopify compliant?" answer is useless. Compliance lives in your specific theme, your apps, and your content — none of which a checklist can see from the outside. (It's also exactly why a scan of your real, live store tells you more than any blog post can. More on that at the end.)

The shared checklist: 6 failures regulators actually cite

Across the real European enforcement cases — Vueling in Spain, the French retailer lawsuits, the German Abmahnung wave — the failing pages were always the same: checkout, forms, and account flows. And the same handful of issues show up on the overwhelming majority of e-commerce sites. Fix these first.

• Low-contrast text and buttons. Pale grey text and low-contrast "designer" buttons are the single most common failure on the web — and unreadable for low-vision shoppers (and anyone in sunlight). You need a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for body text, 3:1 for large text.

  Often DIY
• Missing or useless alt text on product images. A screen-reader user hears nothing where your product photo is — they can't tell what they're buying. "IMG_2043.jpg" is not alt text.

  DIY
• Form fields without real labels. Checkout and contact fields that rely on a placeholder that vanishes when you type, or have no label at all, leave screen-reader users guessing. This has been the most-cited form error for years.

  DIY or dev
• Unhelpful or silent error messages. "Error" with no explanation — or an error that's never announced to a screen reader — stops a checkout dead.

  Dev
• Can't reach checkout by keyboard. A shopper who can't use a mouse must be able to tab through cart → checkout → confirmation. If the focus gets trapped or the focus outline is invisible, they can't buy.

  Dev
• Unnamed icon buttons. The cart, search, hamburger, and close-X icons need an accessible name. Otherwise a screen reader just announces "button" and the user has no idea what it does.

  Dev

One more, because themes love it: auto-rotating carousels and autoplay video. Moving content that you can't pause causes problems for people with vestibular disorders and yanks content away before slower readers finish. If your homepage slideshow auto-rotates with no pause button, turn it off — that's a setting, not a code change.

Shopify

Your theme is not compliant out of the box — and Shopify says so. Even Dawn, Shopify's most accessible free theme, ships with documented gaps: insufficient focus indicators, keyboard and screen-reader issues in modals/carousels/mega-menus, low-contrast banner and menu text, and a cart drawer with awkward focus management. Shopify's own guidance is blunt: it controls the platform, you control the store, and the theme requirements cover only a fraction of WCAG.

What to check on a Shopify store:

• Your theme customizations. Dawn out of the box is decent; the more you change colours, add sections, and bolt on a slideshow, the more you drift from it. Re-check contrast and keyboard access after every theme edit.
• Checkout extensions (Plus). Shopify's checkout is a good accessible baseline — but if you're on Plus and have customized it with Checkout UI Extensions, those custom components routinely reintroduce failures (post-purchase upsell modals missing dialog roles, drag-only quantity sliders, custom clickable elements with no keyboard support).
• Every app you've installed. Review widgets, upsells, popups, and cookie banners inject their own HTML and can override your accessible code — focus traps, unlabeled close buttons, star ratings with no text alternative. Shopify's App Store does not vet apps for accessibility before approval.
• Theme-editor traps: auto-playing slideshows, low-contrast colour-scheme presets, and hover-only mega-menus that keyboard and touch users can't open.

WooCommerce

Here's the good news, and the catch nobody mentions. WooCommerce 10.0 (July 2025) is, in WooCommerce's own words, "fully conformant with [WCAG] 2.2 level AA … when used with a core WordPress or accessibility-ready theme." That's a genuine milestone — over 140 accessibility enhancements across cart, product galleries, and the block-based checkout.

The catch is in that clause. The conformance promise only holds when two things are true:

• You're on the new Cart/Checkout Blocks, not the legacy [woocommerce_checkout] shortcode. Many older stores and PHP-hook extensions still run the shortcode checkout, which doesn't inherit the new work.
• You're on a core or accessibility-ready theme. WooCommerce inherits the active WordPress theme's accessibility. If you run a premium theme or a page builder (Elementor, Divi), you've likely voided the promise — the conformance is only as good as the theme wrapped around it.

So the honest summary for a WooCommerce owner: your platform got dramatically more accessible in 2025, but your specific build probably didn't inherit it. Check which checkout you're running and which theme you're on first.

One important myth to kill: the "accessibility-ready" theme tag does not mean WCAG AA compliant. It means the theme cleared the WordPress Theme Review team's minimum bar (skip links, keyboard navigation, ARIA landmarks). It's a good signal, not a compliance certificate.

WordPress (content & booking sites)

For WordPress sites that aren't strictly stores — brochure sites, booking pages, lead-gen — the issues shift from checkout to content and forms:

• Page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery) generate non-semantic "div soup" and broken heading hierarchies (missing H1, multiple H1s, skipped levels). Both Elementor and Divi now ship remediation helpers, but the default output still needs a review.
• Form plugins vary a lot. Gravity Forms is the strongest on accessibility. Contact Form 7 and WPForms can be made accessible but ship with gaps — poorly labelled checkbox/radio groups, errors that aren't announced, missing required-field semantics. The recurring real-world failure is that it's easy to enable placeholder-only fields or add unlabeled custom ones.
• The content-author trap. Gutenberg keeps improving, but owners use it as a design tool — stacking paragraph blocks where headings belong, pasting lists as plain text. The result looks fine and is unreadable to a screen reader. Use real heading blocks and real list blocks.

The one-click "accessibility app" trap

At some point a plugin or app will promise to make you compliant with one line of code. Do not buy it. Here's the evidence, not just an opinion:

• In April 2025 the US FTC finalised a $1 million order against accessiBe, the best-known overlay vendor, for deceptively claiming its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant. The order bars those claims for 20 years. The FTC specifically called out the pitch that "one line of code" makes a site compliant.
• The Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by 800+ accessibility professionals, states plainly that overlays cannot repair the underlying source-code problems. No automated widget fixes keyboard traps, focus order, or meaningful alt text.
• Overlays attract lawsuits rather than prevent them. In the US, hundreds of accessibility lawsuits have specifically named the overlay widget itself as a barrier.

An overlay is a recurring cost that adds legal risk and fixes nothing structural. Real compliance means fixing your theme's source — which starts with knowing exactly what's broken in it.

Free tools you can use yourself today

You don't need to buy anything to start. These are the free checkers store owners actually use:

The honest caveat that applies to every automated tool — free or paid, including ours: they catch roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues. The other 60–70% (keyboard traps, focus order, meaningful alt text, the real screen-reader experience) needs human testing. A scan is a starting point and a triage list, not a certificate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling an overlay.

Do-it-yourself today vs. call a developer

Where to start

If you do three things this month, do these: turn off any autoplay slideshow, fix contrast and alt text yourself, and find out whether your checkout works with a keyboard alone. That last one is where every real enforcement case has concentrated.

Related reading

• Why your checkout is the page to fix first
• The 10 most common WCAG violations — and how to fix them
• Is your business in scope for the EAA?
• EAA Enforcement Tracker — who's actually been actioned