Some shoppers browse with their ears. A screen reader walks through the page and reads it aloud: product names, prices, buttons. When the page is built well, buying this way is routine. When it is not, the shopper hears this: "image. image. image. button. button."
This week we tested several big Shopify stores the way a screen reader reads them. On one well-known furniture store, one page held 414 buttons and links with no name at all. On a major beauty store, 97 of the 151 images on a product page were blank to a screen reader. On another, 55 of 57 homepage images. These are famous brands with big design budgets.
What the shopper hears
This stopped being optional
Since June 2025, EU accessibility rules (the European Accessibility Act) apply to online shops selling to EU customers. Stores that do not meet them are exposed to complaints and enforcement, country by country. The UK has its own long-standing duty under the Equality Act. Most stores we test would not pass either.
The business case does not need the law. Unnamed buttons and blank images also confuse the machines that matter: Google reads alt text to understand product images, and AI assistants navigate stores the same way screen readers do - by the names of things. A store that is hard for a blind shopper is hard for a shopping agent.
Where the problems come from
- Icon buttons. The cart, the search, the wishlist heart - drawn as icons, named as nothing.
- Product images without descriptions. The theme prints an empty description for every image the merchant did not fill in, and nobody fills them in.
- Color swatches. Twenty tiny buttons per product, all announced as "button".
The fix is boring and fast
- Name every icon button in the theme. One line each.
- Generate image descriptions from data you already have: product title, color, angle.
- Name swatches by their color, not their position.
A theme pass like this takes days, not months, and it does not change how the store looks at all. If you want to know what your store sounds like, ask us - we will test it and send you the exact list, free.