How can a small store achieve ADA compliance?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A small store owner discovered their website needs ADA compliance and found errors using the WAVE accessibility checker. They’re seeking guidance on how to address these issues within Shopify.

Key Points:

  • Automated checkers like WAVE identify only ~30% of accessibility issues and cannot detect problems like keyboard navigation compatibility
  • Manual human testing is essential for full compliance, including testing with tab/enter keys to verify keyboard navigation
  • ADA compliance is similar to SEO—there are basic best practices everyone should follow, but specific optimizations vary by site
  • Progress over perfection is recommended; start learning and making incremental improvements

Ongoing Questions:

  • Whether to rebuild the site with a more accessible theme versus fixing the current one
  • Which website builder (Shopify vs. Wix vs. others) offers the best ADA compliance support
  • Concern that Shopify lacks proactive guidance compared to competitors like Wix, which provides dedicated ADA compliance guides

The discussion remains open with requests for specific resources and platform recommendations.

Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I just found out today that websites have to be ADA COmpliant or else… I’m a small store, how do I get this done? Is there anyone is Shopify works with this?

I ran my URL through https://wave.webaim.org/ and had some errors.

Would someone please let me know what to do.

Thanks,

Christina

2

You’ll have to fix the errors that you found, I believe wave tends to give you options on how to fix these issues. You might not be able to fix it all but then having a good score is what matters most times.

3

I know you posted this months ago, but I’m new to the community and I’m an accessibility consultant. Just in case this info is helpful for you or others reading this post:

Automated online checkers like https://wave.webaim.org/ are a great place to start. But it’s very important to realize that automated checkers have some limitations, and it’s estimated that they only identify about 30% of accessibility issues.

For instance, AI tools (like WAVE) cannot tell you whether your website is able to be navigated by a keyboard (people who have mobility issues and can’t use a mouse with their hand as well as people who have visual disabilities and depend on screen readers navigate through websites using the keyboard). This means by extension that addon tools that use AI can’t fix all your issues either.

Some accessibility requirements can only be tested with manual human testing. Some of that testing isn’t too hard – you can start testing your keyboard navigation by simply trying to use the tab key and the enter key to move around in your website.

Accessibility can feel a little overwhelming especially at the beginning. The important thing to do is to start learning and start making changes to improve your accessibility – progress not perfection. Web accessibility is a form of user experience optimization (making sure there’s a good user experience for people with disabilities – which generally improves the user experience for everyone). It’s a little bit like SEO – there are definitely some basic best practices that everyone SHOULD do, but there are also optimizations that depend a lot on the particular site and products, so there is lots of ambiguity about what meets “ADA compliance”.

Happy to point you toward resources if you have some specific questions about accessibility.

4

Hi, would love to be pointed in the right direction. Wondering if the best thing is to just scrape our current website and start off with a more ADA friendly theme. I also feel like Shopify doesn’t want to touch this subject whereas Wix is being more proactive by offering an ADA compliancy guide (it’s been very helpful with our other website). Wondering what the ADA friendliest website builder is.