EAA compliance for Shopify: WCAG 2.1 AA checklist & fixes

What the EAA actually requires from a Shopify site

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) applies to consumer-facing online services from 28 June 2025. For a Shopify site selling to EU consumers, that means the storefront, checkout, account area, and any embedded payment flow have to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA via the harmonised standard EN 301 549. Microenterprises with under 10 employees and below €2 million in turnover are exempt for services, but not for products.

Fines vary by member state. Germany caps individual penalties at €100,000; France can fine up to 4% of group turnover; Spain reaches €600,000 for serious or repeated breaches. None of those numbers are theoretical — market surveillance authorities have already started auditing storefronts in Germany and France in the run-up to enforcement.

In practice, the work breaks down into three buckets: theme-level fixes (focus styles, contrast, semantics), interaction-level fixes (carousels, modals, drawers, gallery widgets), and content-level fixes (alt text, headings, descriptive link text). The list below covers the Shopify-specific failure points we see most often during scans.

Top WCAG failures we see on Shopify sites

Across hundreds of Shopify scans, the same handful of issues show up over and over. None of them require ripping the theme apart — most are fixable in a few hours by someone comfortable in the platform's editor or template files.

• Color contrast on sale badges, "Add to cart" buttons and theme accents

  Themes default to brand colors that often fail the 4.5:1 ratio for body text or 3:1 for large text. Sale prices in red on white and gray placeholder text are the two most-flagged issues in our scans.

  1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) — Level AA

• Cart drawers and quick-view modals trap focus or break Esc

  Shopify themes commonly use a slide-in cart drawer that does not move focus into the dialog or restore focus on close. Users on a screen reader or keyboard get stuck on the page background.

  2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap, 2.4.3 Focus Order — Level A

• Product image gallery is mouse-only

  Many themes implement zoom, swatch swap, and gallery navigation with mouse handlers (mouseenter/click) but no keyboard equivalents (Enter/Arrow), failing keyboard users.

  2.1.1 Keyboard — Level A

• Form fields without programmatic labels

  Customer registration, address, and contact forms frequently use placeholder-only inputs or visually-hidden labels that screen readers do not pick up. Newsletter signups in the footer are the most common offender.

  1.3.1 Info and Relationships, 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value — Level A

• Decorative product carousels auto-advance without controls

  Hero sliders that auto-rotate faster than 5 seconds with no pause/stop control fail WCAG and create distraction for users with vestibular disorders.

  2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide — Level A

Concrete code fixes for Shopify

Below are copy-paste fixes for the most common Shopify issues. They assume you have access to your theme code or the platform's custom-code injection panel. If you cannot edit code directly, share these snippets with whoever maintains the site — every one of them is a ten-minute change.

<button type="button" class="cart-toggle" aria-label="Open cart with {{ cart.item_count }} items">
  {% render 'icon-cart' %}
</button>

:where(button, a, [role="button"], input, select, textarea):focus-visible {
  outline: 2px solid var(--color-foreground);
  outline-offset: 2px;
  box-shadow: 0 0 0 4px rgb(8 145 178 / 0.25);
}

// Open
const lastFocused = document.activeElement;
drawer.removeAttribute('inert');
drawer.querySelector('[autofocus], button, a').focus();

// Close
drawer.setAttribute('inert', '');
lastFocused?.focus();

Tools and plugins worth installing first

• Theme Inspector (Shopify) — confirms HTML is semantic before deeper audits

• axe DevTools browser extension for ad-hoc page checks

• Certvo public scan — crawls product, collection, and cart pages and groups issues by template

How to scan a Shopify site without missing anything

Automated scanners catch about 30–40% of WCAG issues; the rest need manual review. The good news is that the 30–40% includes the most expensive issues to remediate after the fact, so an automated scan is the cheapest way to get unstuck. Run one before you change a line of theme code.

• Scan at minimum: home, /collections/all, a product page, /cart, and the checkout login page.

• Re-scan after changing the theme via Customize — most regressions come from new sections.

• Run a logged-in scan against the customer account area; it is excluded from public crawls.

Frequently asked questions

Other e-commerce platform platforms