Most accessibility studies look at the biggest sites. We wanted ordinary Shopify stores, and not just home pages.
Method: we shuffled the .com and .us domains in the Tranco top-1M list (V349N), found 130 live Shopify stores selling at least one product, and scanned four pages of each (home, a collection, a product, the cart) with axe-core 4.13 and the WCAG 2.0/2.1/2.2 A and AA rules. 69 stores loaded at least 3 of 4 pages; most of the rest were cut off by Shopify's per-visitor rate limit.
What we found:
| Problem | Stores |
|---|---|
| Low color contrast | 88% |
| Links with no accessible name | 61% |
| Invalid or misused ARIA | 51% |
| Tap targets too small (WCAG 2.2) | 51% |
| Images with no text alternative | 46% |
| Keyboard problems | 35% |
| Buttons with no accessible name | 25% |
| Form fields with no label | 22% |
| Pinch-to-zoom turned off | 20% |
- 97% had at least one detectable failure (WebAIM Million: 95.9% of home pages).
- Product pages (91%) and cart pages (90%) were no cleaner than the home page.
- All 11 stores running an accessibility overlay still had failures. Small sample, but an overlay runs on top of the page and leaves the markup as it was.
Limits: automated checks find only part of the problem, and a failure isn't a legal finding. We don't name any store.
Full write-up, including where each problem is usually fixed in Shopify: https://adatriage.com/shopify-accessibility-study-2026
Top comments (1)
The 46% figure for images without text alternatives is probably the part that stands out most to me for Shopify stores.
I’d treat ALT text as accessibility content first, rather than another field to stuff with keywords. The challenge for larger catalogs is then operational: fixing hundreds or thousands of images without publishing generic or repetitive descriptions everywhere.
A workflow I like is generate drafts in bulk, review the exceptions and important products, approve the changes, then publish.
I personally use Rankora for that bulk Shopify layer because the image ALT text stays editable and can be reviewed before publishing. It also handles SEO Titles, Meta Descriptions and Collection Content, but for this use case the review step around ALT text is the important part.