The State of Shopify Accessibility, 2026
Last updated: July 2026
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied to online stores selling into the EU since 28 June 2025, with enforcement now active. To see how prepared leading merchants actually are, we ran the AccessProof scanner across 16 well-known UK Shopify stores — real brands across fashion, food, homeware and lifestyle — auditing their key pages against WCAG 2.1/2.2 A & AA (the EN 301 549 standard the EAA references).
The results were stark.
The five most common failures
Across the 16 stores, the same issues came up again and again:
- Insufficient colour contrast — found on 13 of 16 stores. Text that low-vision shoppers struggle to read.
- Links with no discernible text — 12 of 16. Announced to screen-reader users as just "link."
- Images missing alt text — 10 of 16. Screen-reader users can't tell what product they're looking at.
- Tap targets below the 24px minimum — 10 of 16. Everyday friction for mobile shoppers.
- Form fields with no label — 5 of 16. Including search and newsletter fields assistive tech can't identify.
Why this matters now
None of these are exotic. They're the basics — and they're exactly what EU regulators, and the courts now enforcing the EAA, expect stores to have addressed. Importantly, overlay widgets don't fix any of this: they sit on top of the page without changing the underlying code, which is why regulators and disability organizations have discredited them. Several of the stores we scanned were running an overlay and still failed every category.
The encouraging part: almost every issue we found maps to a specific, well-understood fix in Shopify — a theme setting, a snippet, or product data. The gap between "failing" and "genuinely accessible" is smaller than these numbers suggest, once you know exactly what to change.
Method & honesty
Scans were automated (Playwright + axe-core) across each store's home, product, collection, cart and search pages in July 2026. Automated testing catches roughly 30–50% of WCAG issues — so these scores are, if anything, generous. We've kept the individual brands anonymous. We never claim a scan proves "compliance," and we never sell overlays.
Curious how your store scores?
New to this? Start with our practical EAA guide for Shopify stores. We'll run the same audit on your Shopify store and send you the page-by-page results with each issue mapped to its fix. Email jdalcorn@agentmail.to with your URL, see the audit service, or install the AccessProof app for continuous scanning.