How to ensure ADA and WCAG compliance on my Shopify store?

[BradR]

I can find very little about this in Shopify documentation. What developers have you used or steps have you taken to be as ADA & WCAG compliant as possible? Will all Shopify themes become compliant by default at some point?

[NoOneHere]

Wondering the same thing.  Ultimately the owner of the store is responsible. I know in Denver, we had 50 lawsuits in about one week last year. I heard the average payout out was $38,000 per and they still had to go in and fix their websites.  Diving into a site now and see how easy it is to get one compliant.  The thing is there are millions of sites in the US open to complaints.  I checked 20 sites randomly and not one was in compliance.  Yikes!

This is going to be huge in 2021.

[hankber]

I am being sued now and need to know how to fix my site.   I am not good with the web - do I need to hire outside agency to complete this for us?  Very small company.

Thank you.

[hankber]

Yes - getting a ton of soliciting emails to fix this issue.  It is shame that Shopify does not make it free as other sites do.

[NoOneHere]

Just did an ADA compliance check for that app and that site is not compliant 🙂  You really have to be careful which solution you use. 🙂  You can check out what we are doing over at iQMarketers.com The thing is not only does your Shopify store have to comply, but so does your website.  It is a Hairball that is fueled by White Shark Attoneys going after money.

[NoOneHere]

You guys have 1 error and 36 alerts and that is just a quick scan. Might want to get those checked. It happens. 🙂

[Mbarrow1965]

NoOneHere,

We just received an email that we're being sued for ADA non-compliance. Can you share info on becoming compliant? How did you go about it? Who did you hire to fix your site? 

Margaret

It's Nola

[Mischa1]

Has anyone found a good solution? 

[DHeenan]

From what I can find, Shopify is WCAG 2.1 compliant on all Shopify 2.0 themes in the theme store.  However the newest standard seems to be WCAG 2.3, so even if you start with one of those you will likely still need to do some work to keep ahead of the curve.

Also, this doesn't apply to any content you add to your webstore.  You will need to make that content meet the requirements too. 

If you speak with any of the resources, auditing companies, or remediation companies you will quickly be told that automated scans typically only catch 30% of issues, and if you use different automated scans they may not give you the same results.  We have received multiple quotes and depending on the depth and scope of work, can be from around $4,000 to $25,000. 

This is something that it is a good idea to find a good resource to do the more complicated things, and have someone inhouse that learns the basics and can remediate some of the simpler issues that might come up. 

By the way, this part is not to speak negatively about the overlays and apps, but the information I have come across on this is split pretty close to 50/50 on if they are beneficial or not. Some say they are, while others say it interferes with other software that people with disabilities are already using.

We were using an app for a few months, but decided to remove it, because they don't remediate your site. If you ever want to go away from the app then you have to do all the work on your site anyway.

If anyone know of, or has found a better way, I would love to hear it.

[MattiasAsk]

I’ll start off by saying that I’m the CEO of Squidler so that there is no question about my intentions. That being said - I sincerley think Squidler.io is a good and price effective solution for checking accessibility for Shopify stores.

Squidler performs continuous and fully autonomous testing of websites. All you have to do is provide an URL and Squidler checks for functional problems, accessibility issues, language and spelling mistakes and more.

How it works is that it opens your website in an actual browser, and navigates and interacts with it much like a human would. While surfing the website it evaluates against a number of rules, including all of axe-core which check WCAG 2.3 et al. Since we load the website and navigate it in a browser even dynamically loaded content will be check against it.

You can subscribe to Squidler.io for €49 and your website will be tested every day in different ways and interactions. Each test can obviously not be complete, so the way it works is that it navigates and testing over time with a level of informed randomness. During these tests it also checks spelling and grammar with LanguageTool and a number of functional and usability issues like code in content, unintentional side scroll, crashes, dead ends, dead links and much more.

When a problem is found you will receive an email (or you can configure so you get a slack notification) and a link to a video-like step by step walkthrough of how and where the problem was found.

On Squidler.io you can do a short, initial test run, and if you want to see problem details for that short test you can sign up without providing any card details.

Sorry for the long pitch, but I genuinely think we can help. Please ping me if you have any further questions! /Mattias Ask

[Mbarrow1965]

Why doesn't Shopify have more information about ADA Non-Compliance when you purchase a website from them? I had never heard of such a thing on a website. My web designer assumed that Shopify had the basics covered. Now I am getting emails that I am being sued for ADA Non-Compliance. I am so frustrated right now. I don't know if I'm being scammed or not. I haven't been served, so I haven't done anything yet. I've only received emails. 

Margaret

[NoOneHere]

Because most Web Designs are clueless about this until they get sued
although it has been the law for 6 years now. 😞

[Mbarrow1965]

I just started getting emails about an ADA Non-Compliance lawsuit because of my Shopify website. Why am I responsible? I paid for a theme from Shopify. Why isn't this a part of Shopify's responsibility? What am I supposed to do? Please advise someone who has been through this. Any lawyer recommendations? 

Thanks. 

Margaret

It's Nola

[NoOneHere]

Depending on what the demand letter is best thing you can do is to get an automated widget on there. If they screenshotted you and you were not in compliance, your chance of winning in court is less than 1%. It is estimated there may be as much as 15 Billion in penalties in the next 12 months or so. I would install this plugin. It is the best one out there and we have been doing ADA compliance for over 25 years now. ADA Compliance Widget They also have a Legal Compliance kit.  Hope this helps. Not sure why Shopify does not warn people.  Sad really.  If you need help, ping me and can help you get it set up at no charge.  Hate seeing this happen. 😞 

[BradR]

These are fair questions. We have just been sued again. We will encourage the party and law firm to go for the big fish, Shopify. Shopify completely buries their head in the sand regarding this. That said, the lawyers and "plaintiffs" are very unethical and do this for a living just to make money. 

[hankber]

I have not read all the threads so I may be repeating things.  I was sued two years ago and they specifically target Shopify shops because they know Shopify does nothing to support its stores.  If we tried to sell something illegal on the site we would be shut down.  But when we post a website that defies Federal ADA Laws, they do not even offer a warning.  At the time, if you searched their help, you could not even find a mention of ADA.   But yet here we still are because it is too expensive for small businesses to start over on another host.    If you have not been sued, you will be it.  Check out Accessibe.com 

[galison]

I know it's been a few years since this original post, but it seems there weren't many good answers and people are still wondering about this. We've been sued a 3 times over the last 4 years. The first time we just ignored the problem, the second time we added the Accessibly App (there are many similar ones on the app store), and now after the third time (even with the app) -- and paying tens of thousand of dollars to settle the suits --  we know that it's all about your theme code. It's all about the tags. Your site has to be coded properly with alt tags (images), aria labels/tags and other html tags (descriptions, meta fields, etc). If your theme isn't coded properly you won't be ADA/WCAG compliant. And all the so-called Compliancy Apps only offer a surface level of "compliancy" - even their fine print warranty says they "do not guarantee compliance with WAS/WCAG/ADA/Section 508/EN 301549". Most disabled users of websites (and particularly those in cahoots with law firms to bring lawsuits) have their own website "reader" programs so the apps aren't really doing much of anything anyway. We still pay for the basic plan, just in case. We are in the process of hiring a freelance coder to clean up our theme's code to be compliant. So my biggest advice is to make sure you buy a theme that is coded well and as close to ADA compliant as possible. Shopify can't help and never will because they only provide the platform - not the website code itself (maybe a few of the free themes). But they actually do have some problems with checkout extensibility that is also not ADA. 

[NoOneHere]

Did you guys use Accessibee?  It is the only one that I know that works
most of the time.  As far as Shopify or any other big service not being
ADA compliant... It is really not that hard folks if you have
programmers that are competent.  Therein lies the rub... We use Woo
Commerce to get our clients stores compliant right out of the gate. That
is pretty much why we will not build on Shopify.  As you know, getting
sued is overrated. Best of luck going forward.