What a free website accessibility checker finds on your Shopify store, and misses

Can a free ADA compliance checker tell you you’re done?

The answer is no. Not from a free checker, and not from a paid one either.

Whatever a checker calls itself, even an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) checker, it runs only the tests it can. Some things need a person to look. W3C puts it simply: “no tool alone can determine if a site meets accessibility standards.”

A checker is still worth running. What it finds is worth fixing.

What can a checker catch for you?

A checker is good at problems a rule can spot. Here are a few you’d recognize on a Shopify store.

• Faint text. Text should be dark enough to read easily. 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) asks for “at least 4.5:1” between text and its background. Faint gray can hide in small places: sold-out sizes, review dates, the labels in a sign-up pop-up.
• A button inside a button. Think of a sign-up teaser in the corner with its own close button inside. A screen reader may announce it wrongly. A keyboard shopper may skip right past it.
• Buttons too small to tap, or one covering another. A checker that tests target size will flag these. More in our post on target size.
• A photo with no description at all.

Some problems only show on one kind of page. Sold-out sizes and review dates live on product pages. A pop-up may open only on your homepage. Check just one page and you’d miss the rest.

What does a checker leave for you to decide?

Some checkers also give you a second list: things they couldn’t decide. Each one needs a person to look. Two kinds you might see:

• Words on a photo. A checker often can’t work out the color behind words laid over a picture. So it can’t measure them. You can look and decide in a few seconds.
• Very short text. A label as short as a size like “9” can be too short for a checker to judge, so it may leave it for you.

What can’t a checker see?

Where you are when you press Tab. Each press of Tab moves you to the next link, button or field. That spot is called focus. 2.4.7 Focus Visible asks that you can see it. Only looking tells you whether you can. Our post on shopping your store by keyboard only walks you through it.

Whether a description fits its photo. Alt text is the description a screen reader reads out in place of a picture. A checker can tell you it’s there. It can’t tell you it’s right. W3C is clear: to know if it fits, “you need to see the image and judge it in context.” More in our post on writing alt text for your Shopify photos.

An empty description. Blank alt text tells screen readers to skip a picture as decoration, so a checker passes it. A shopper who can’t see that photo hears nothing about it. Some themes leave a product photo blank when nobody has written alt text for it. A checker can’t tell a blank left by mistake from one chosen on purpose.