This guide explains what ADA compliance actually means for an ecommerce business, where the platforms stop and your responsibility begins, why "one-click" accessibility widgets are a trap, and what real remediation looks like when the work is done right.
What ADA compliance means for an ecommerce website
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990, before the modern web existed. The text says nothing about websites. The relevance to ecommerce comes from how the courts have interpreted Title III, which prohibits discrimination "in places of public accommodation."
For years, courts have ruled that ecommerce stores qualify as places of public accommodation under Title III. The Department of Justice has taken the same position since 1996, and in 2024 finalized a rule requiring state and local government websites to be accessible. Private ecommerce sites are not subject to that specific rule, but the principle is settled: if your store is open to the public and people with disabilities can't use it, you have a problem.
The DOJ does not publish a checklist of what an ecommerce website must do to comply. Instead, courts and regulators look to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium. WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the de facto benchmark in most US accessibility cases. WCAG 2.2, finalized in 2023, is what most accessibility professionals now audit against.
The four WCAG principles are sometimes summarized as POUR:
Perceivable. Content can be detected by at least one sense. Images need text alternatives. Video needs captions. Color cannot be the only way information is conveyed.
Operable. Visitors can navigate and interact with the site, regardless of how they input. Every action that works with a mouse must also work with a keyboard. Time-based interactions need adjustable limits.
Understandable. Content reads clearly, predictably, and at a reasonable reading level. Error messages explain what went wrong and how to fix it.
Robust. Code is clean enough that assistive technologies (screen readers, switch devices, voice control) can interpret it reliably, both now and as those technologies evolve.
When a plaintiff sues over an inaccessible store, these are the principles their expert will test against.
Why ecommerce sites are the primary target
A few facts explain the lawsuit landscape:
- An entire cottage industry of plaintiff firms now runs automated scanners against ecommerce sites at scale, then sends demand letters. In 2024, the twenty most active firms filed roughly 4,000 court cases between them. For every lawsuit filed, defense attorneys estimate 7 to 10 additional demand letters get sent.
- Pre-litigation settlements typically range from $4,000 to $16,000. Most small businesses settle rather than fight, because litigating costs more than the settlement.
- Settling does not protect you from being sued again. Sweetgreen settled a lawsuit in 2016 with a commitment to bring its site into compliance, then was sued again in 2024 over new violations.
- First-violation fines under Title III can reach $75,000 for violations occurring on or after April 28, 2014.
Headline cases give a sense of the upper end. Target settled for $6 million in 2008. H&R Block paid $1.2 million in 2017. Netflix paid $755,000 in 2013. Harvard and MIT paid $750,000 in 2015. But those numbers obscure where most of the activity lives: thousands of small and mid-size merchants paying five-figure settlements every year.
Ecommerce stores are preferred targets precisely because they're easy to scan, easy to sue, and likely to settle quickly.
What Shopify handles, and what you handle
Shopify operates on a shared-responsibility model. The platform makes some accessibility commitments, and the merchant owns the rest.
What Shopify handles:
- The standard checkout flow on Shopify Plus and Shopify, which has been independently tested against WCAG via a published VPAT.
- The core merchant admin interface.
- A few of its own first-party themes, including Dawn, which Shopify has published an accessibility conformance report for.
What the merchant handles:
- Every customization made to the theme.
- Every product image (alt text, captions, decorative-vs-meaningful flags).
- Color contrast choices across the storefront.
- All written content: product descriptions, marketing copy, blog posts, policy pages.
- Navigation structure, menu labels, and information architecture.
- Every installed third-party app and the markup it injects.
- Any custom code added by a developer or freelance contractor.
In other words, "Shopify is accessible" is not a defense. The platform might check most of WCAG on the checkout page, but if your product detail template has unlabeled buttons, your image carousel can't be operated by keyboard, and your color palette fails contrast, you are on the hook.
What BigCommerce handles, and what you handle
BigCommerce takes a similar shared-responsibility position. The platform publishes accessibility guidance, ships with themes that meet a baseline of best practices, and provides a content management system capable of producing accessible output. None of that guarantees an accessible storefront.
What BigCommerce handles:
- The core admin interface.
- Stencil-based themes from BigCommerce ship with reasonable semantic structure, basic ARIA roles, and keyboard support out of the box.
- The hosted checkout flow.
What the merchant handles:
- Every theme customization, especially any custom Stencil work done by an agency or freelancer.
- Product imagery, alt text, and how images are described in templates.
- Color palette selections in the theme editor.
- All page content, including content blocks built in the Page Builder.
- Forms beyond the standard checkout (newsletter signups, request-a-quote, B2B account applications).
- Third-party apps and the markup they inject into pages.
- Custom JavaScript and any single-page-application behavior added on top of Stencil.
Both platforms give you the building blocks for an accessible site. Neither delivers one automatically.
Why accessibility overlays don't fix the problem
The most tempting offer in this space is the accessibility overlay: a JavaScript widget that drops a small icon onto your site, claims to detect accessibility issues, and promises one-click WCAG compliance for $20 to $50 a month. AccessiBe, UserWay, EqualWeb, and a handful of similar vendors dominate this category.
Overlays do not work. The evidence is overwhelming.
The users they claim to help reject them. WebAIM surveyed 758 accessibility practitioners and people with disabilities. 72% of respondents with disabilities rated overlays as "not at all" or "not very effective." Only 2.4% called them "very effective."
Courts cite them as evidence of inadequate remediation. In the Murphy v. Eyebobs case, the complaint specifically called out that Eyebobs had installed an overlay and that the overlay had failed to provide screen reader users with full and equal access. The overlay didn't protect Eyebobs; it became part of the complaint.
The FTC has taken enforcement action. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle charges of misleading advertising about the effectiveness of its product.
Technically, they can't fix what they claim to fix. Overlays operate as a layer on top of your site's existing code. They can't restructure broken HTML, fix incorrect ARIA, change a color palette that fails contrast, or rewrite an image's alt text. In many cases, they actively interfere with screen readers and other assistive technologies that the user has already configured to work the way they need.
The accessibility community has been clear. The "Overlay Fact Sheet," signed by hundreds of accessibility professionals, recommends against overlay use as a primary compliance strategy.
If a vendor or agency tells you that installing a widget will make your store ADA-compliant, they are either misinformed or selling you a product they know is inadequate. Real compliance is done at the code level.
What real remediation looks like
A legitimate ADA remediation program for an ecommerce site has four parts: audit, fix, document, maintain.
1. Audit
A real audit combines automated scanning with manual testing. Automated tools (Axe, WAVE, Lighthouse, SortSite) are fast and catch the obvious technical defects: missing alt attributes, contrast ratios below threshold, missing form labels, invalid ARIA. UK government research that tested 13 popular automated scanners against a known set of 142 accessibility barriers found that the best performer caught only 40% of the issues.
The other 60% requires manual testing:
- Navigating the entire purchase flow using only a keyboard.
- Running NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver through the same flow and verifying that every product, price, variant, and add-to-cart confirmation is announced correctly.
- Reviewing whether alt text actually describes the image, not whether alt text exists.
- Confirming that error messages on forms are descriptive and tied to the right field.
- Testing mobile accessibility, including touch target size and screen rotation behavior.
The audit deliverable should be a written report tied to specific WCAG success criteria, with screenshots, page URLs, and recommended fixes for each finding.
2. Fix
Remediation is done in the codebase: the theme template files, the product data, the CSS, the JavaScript. On Shopify, that means Liquid template edits, JSON template adjustments, theme-section overhauls, and sometimes a theme migration. On BigCommerce, that means Stencil template work, theme.scss adjustments, and rewrites of any custom JavaScript.
The work falls into a predictable set of categories:
- Image accessibility. Adding meaningful alt text to product images. Marking decorative images appropriately. Ensuring product galleries are keyboard-operable.
- Color and contrast. Adjusting brand palette to meet 4.5:1 contrast for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Removing instances where color alone conveys meaning (red-text-means-error, green-dot-means-in-stock).
- Heading structure. Fixing pages that skip from H1 to H3, or that use heading tags for visual styling rather than document structure.
- Forms. Ensuring every input has a programmatic label, not just a placeholder. Linking error messages to the field that caused them. Making error states distinguishable by more than just color.
- Keyboard support. Adding focus indicators that are visible and meet contrast requirements. Adding skip-to-main-content links. Making dropdown menus, mega menus, and modal dialogs operable without a mouse.
- Semantic HTML and ARIA. Replacing div-soup with proper landmarks (header, nav, main, footer). Adding ARIA only where native semantics aren't enough, and removing ARIA that's been misapplied.
- Multimedia. Adding captions to product videos. Removing autoplay. Removing or replacing animated content that flashes more than three times per second.
- Third-party apps. Auditing every app that injects markup or behavior into the storefront. Removing or replacing apps that introduce accessibility issues you can't control.
3. Document
This step is the one most merchants skip, and it matters. Courts evaluating an ADA claim look for evidence of a good-faith effort. That evidence is documentation:
- A published accessibility statement on your site, naming the standard you've adopted (typically WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA) and providing a contact method for users who encounter barriers.
- The audit report itself, retained in your records.
- A remediation log showing what was fixed, when, and by whom.
- An accommodation request channel: a phone number or email that a customer with a disability can use to request help completing a purchase.
If you ever receive a demand letter, the existence of this documentation changes the conversation. Without it, you have nothing to point to.
4. Maintain
Accessibility is not a one-time project. Every product you add, every page you publish, every theme update, every new app installation can introduce new barriers. Sustainable compliance means:
- Training content editors on alt text and heading structure.
- Including accessibility checks in your release process when you publish theme updates.
- Re-auditing the site at least annually, and after any significant redesign.
- Monitoring with an automated tool between audits, understanding that automated scans only catch part of the picture.
This is the difference between a $5,000 audit that sits in a drawer and a real accessibility program. The former buys you a snapshot. The latter actually protects you.