The lawsuit hidden in your website.

No. Shopify provides a well-built foundation, but it does not warrant that any store meets accessibility standards. Shopify's own published Accessibility Conformance Reports describe its checkout and default Dawn theme as “partially supporting” several WCAG Level AA criteria, including color contrast and visible focus, and Shopify expressly disclaims any warranty regarding those reports.

Everything a merchant adds on top of the platform, including custom themes, design changes and third-party apps, is the merchant's responsibility. Apps are not reviewed for accessibility as a condition of listing in the Shopify App Store. Independent research by WebAIM found that in 2026, Shopify home pages in its sample averaged more detectable accessibility errors than the overall average of the top one million websites.

Accessibility “overlay” widgets do not change this, since they do not alter the underlying code. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has taken enforcement action against unsubstantiated claims that such tools make websites compliant.

Accessrank identifies barriers in your store's actual theme and app code, remediates them at the source, and documents the work. That is the approach courts and settlement agreements consistently look for.

No. An overlay is a script that loads on top of your store and tries to patch problems while the page is displayed. It leaves the underlying code exactly as it was, so a screen reader or keyboard user hits the same barriers, and plaintiffs' firms have learned to look for overlay scripts as a sign that nothing was actually fixed. In September 2026, 91 of the 360 digital accessibility lawsuits UsableNet tracked, about one in four, involved a site running a third-party widget. Across 2024, UsableNet reported more than 1,000 businesses sued despite having a widget, more than 25% of cases.

In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misrepresented its product's ability to make websites compliant with WCAG.

Accessrank does not install a widget. We fix the HTML, CSS and ARIA in your theme and app code, so the improvement is in the store itself.

It is your accessibility score, and only that: how your store measures against the 55 WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA checks, the ones US courts and settlements reference. Nothing else is blended in.

Your report also shows two separate numbers beside it: an on-page SEO score and an AI readiness score, which measures how well shopping agents and AI search tools can read your store. They are reported alongside the accessibility score, not folded into it, so you always know which number a lawyer would look at. See how we score.

Accessrank fixes every finding in your theme code, and most of it within the first remediation cycle. Our remediation tooling handles the fixes that follow clear rules, such as labels, structure, focus handling and markup.

The findings that need a judgment call, such as writing or reviewing alt text, describing media and deciding how a control should behave, are done and reviewed by an Accessrank staff member. You get a record of what changed and why.

Almost never in a way shoppers would notice. The large majority of fixes are invisible: labels for screen readers, heading structure, keyboard focus handling, form markup and alt text.

The one visible exception is color contrast. If your brand palette uses text that is too light against its background, we propose the smallest adjustment that passes and agree it with you before anything goes live.

Most stores are live with a raised score in 2 to 4 weeks, depending on catalog size and how much custom code your theme carries. If you have already been served a demand letter or lawsuit, we target the cited and critical-path issues in about 7 days.

The same fixes that raise your accessibility score, such as alt text, heading structure, semantic HTML and ARIA labeling, are structural signals search engines read too. In a Semrush study of 847 sites, 73% saw organic-traffic growth after remediation (avg. +12%), and a larger 2025 Semrush study of 10,000 sites found higher-accessibility-score sites averaged 23% more organic traffic and 27% more ranking keywords.

Those gains come with every plan. Whether AI assistants recommend your products depends on product data an accessibility audit never looks at: titles, ratings and brand facts, and your Merchant Center feed. On Growth plans and above, we rebuild that product data across your catalog, then ask the AI assistants again at 30 and 60 days to see whether they now name your brand.

These results are correlational, not causal, and individual results vary.

WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international checklist for whether a website works for people with disabilities. It is published by the W3C, the body that sets web standards, and it is the yardstick US courts, the Department of Justice and settlement agreements use when they decide whether a site meets the ADA.

It has three levels. Level A is the minimum and is not enough on its own. Level AA is the middle level and the one legal guidance references. Level AAA is aspirational and largely unachievable for an ecommerce catalog, so we do not test against it. We score and fix against the 55 Level A and AA checks, the legally relevant ones.

No, and be wary of any tool that claims it does. Automated testing, including our free check, catches roughly a third to a half of accessibility barriers. It is a fast way to surface obvious issues, but full WCAG conformance also requires manual testing with a keyboard and a screen reader, which is what our paid audits and remediation include.

Our ongoing monitoring works the same way: it watches your store for the problems that can be machine-checked, so a new app, theme edit or product upload does not quietly undo the work. The manual pass happens at onboarding and in each remediation cycle.

Many DTC stores do. The IRS Disabled Access Credit (Form 8826) lets eligible small businesses claim 50% of qualifying accessibility expenses between $250 and $10,250 in a year, up to $5,000 back against your tax bill.

To be eligible, your business needs either $1 million or less in gross receipts, or 30 or fewer full-time employees, in the preceding tax year. The credit is non-refundable and subject to IRS rules. Accessrank is not a tax advisor and this is not tax advice, so confirm your eligibility with a qualified professional.

No. Accessrank's services are built around US standards: the ADA and WCAG 2.2 Level AA. We do not currently offer European Accessibility Act conformance work or make any claims about EU compliance. The code-level fixes we make are the same ones any accessibility standard asks for, but if you need documented EAA conformance you will want a specialist in that market.

Talk to us right away. Our lawsuit-response engagement starts at $5,900 and moves in about 7 days: an emergency audit of the cited and critical-path barriers, source-code remediation of the complaint items, a screen-reader proof video, VPAT and conformance documentation, and a technical review of the remediation requirements in any proposed settlement terms, prepared for your attorney. The details are in the “Already facing a claim” section above.

Accessrank is not a law firm and does not provide legal representation or advice. This runs alongside your attorney, not instead of one.

Alt text review, which a person does on every plan, checks the descriptions of your images. Human testing goes further: a person works through your store the way a shopper using only a keyboard or a screen reader does, then signs and dates the result. It finds problems automated checks cannot, such as a pop-up you cannot close or a cart update that is never announced.

A flow is one shopping task from start to finish, like finding a product and adding it to your cart. We count tasks, not pages. A typical store has flows for browsing and menus, search, collections with filters, a product page with options, the cart, checkout, logging in and contact forms, and each third-party app, such as reviews or chat, adds its own. Your free audit counts the flows in your store.

Growth includes human testing once a year (up to 8 flows) and Scale includes it twice a year (up to 16 flows). If you have already been served, see the options and prices. Read the full explanation.

No, and the difference matters. A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) is a standard form that software vendors fill in to tell buyers how their product performs against WCAG today. It was designed for universities and government agencies comparing software, and it answers one question: where does this product stand right now?

That is useful, which is why the Record includes one. But a VPAT is a single form on a single date, self-reported and usually from automated scans. It says nothing about when you started, what you fixed, or whether you kept going, and a plaintiff's firm can read one and still argue you only acted after they contacted you.

The Record is built to answer that argument: a dated baseline from before any fixes, so the timeline starts with you, not the letter; a fix-by-fix log with re-test results, matched to whatever a letter alleges; signed monitoring certificates after every scan, proving the work continued as your store changed; and a published accessibility statement with a contact path.