Shopify accessibility and the EAA

Where Shopify stores usually fail

The most common issues we see on Shopify audits aren't exotic: product images with empty or missing alt text (Shopify never requires you to fill this field in), cart drawers and quick-view modals that trap keyboard focus or don't return focus to the triggering button when closed, and low-contrast text in theme color presets that look fine on a designer's monitor but fail WCAG's 4.5:1 ratio for body text. Third-party apps are a recurring source too — review widgets, upsell popups, and countdown-timer bars are frequently built without keyboard support or proper ARIA roles, since app developers optimize for conversion metrics, not accessibility.

What the theme store does and doesn't guarantee

Shopify's Theme Store lets you filter by accessibility-related features in some themes' listings, and a subset of themes are built with more deliberate semantic markup than others. That's a reasonable starting point, but a theme description isn't an audit result — the same theme can pass or fail depending on which sections, apps, and custom CSS a merchant layers on top of it. There's no substitute for actually scanning the live store.

Does the EAA apply to a Shopify store?

If you sell to consumers in the EU and you're not a qualifying micro-enterprise (under 10 employees and under €2 million annual turnover or balance sheet), yes — the EAA's requirements apply to your storefront regardless of which ecommerce platform it runs on. Shopify being a non-EU company doesn't change that; the obligation sits with the merchant selling into the EU market, not the platform vendor.

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