You can get a good first answer in fifteen minutes, with no tools beyond your browser. You will not get a complete answer that way, and nobody honest will tell you an automated score is enough. But you will know whether you have a problem, and roughly how big.
Why it matters now
The European Accessibility Act has applied to online shops selling into the EU since 28 June 2025. The standard behind it is WCAG 2.1 level AA. The smallest businesses, fewer than ten staff and under two million euros in turnover, are exempt. Most stores reading this are not. The UK has its own duty under the Equality Act.
The commercial reason is simpler. Around one in five people has some form of disability. A store they cannot use is a store they leave.
What we found on eight stores
The easiest thing to measure is images with no description. A screen reader has nothing to say about them, and Google has nothing to understand them by. On the eight Shopify homepages above, between a quarter and four fifths of the images were silent. These are established brands, not hobby shops.
Five checks, fifteen minutes
- Run Lighthouse. In Chrome, open the developer tools, choose Lighthouse, tick Accessibility, and run it on your homepage and a product page. It lists images with no description, buttons with no name, and low-contrast text. Fix what it finds, then remember it only catches part of the problem.
- Put the mouse away. Use only the Tab and Enter keys to go from the homepage to a product, choose a size, add it to the cart and reach checkout. If you get stuck, or cannot see where you are on the page, so does every keyboard user.
- Listen to your header. Turn on VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, or NVDA on Windows, which is free. Move through the header. If the search, account and cart icons are announced as just "button", a blind shopper cannot tell which is which. We have measured stores with hundreds of these on one page.
- Zoom to 200%. The page should still work: no text cut off, no buttons hidden behind other things.
- Read your own promo text. Light grey on white, or white on a pale photo, fails people with low vision and everyone on a phone in sunlight.
What usually needs fixing
On Shopify the same few things come up on almost every store, and none of them changes how the site looks:
- Image descriptions, generated from the product data you already hold, with the handful in the page design written by hand.
- Names on icon buttons: search, cart, account, close, next. One line each in the theme.
- A visible focus outline, so keyboard users can see where they are.
- Pop-ups that can be closed from the keyboard and do not trap the shopper inside.
Be careful with overlay widgets that promise accessibility in one line of code. They do not fix the underlying page, and many disabled users find them get in the way.
If you want the full list for your store, send us the address. We will run the checks and send you what we find, item by item.