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
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