How to Make Your Shopify Store ADA Compliant in 2024

Learning how to make your store ADA compliant is more important than you’d think. Not only does it ensure you adhere to crucial web accessibility regulations, but it could also be the key to attracting and converting more loyal customers.

Studies show one in four US adults live with some form of disability, but only 3% of the internet is accessible to these individuals. Here’s your step-by-step guide to ensuring you can reach as many potential customers as possible with your Shopify store.

What is Web Accessibility? The Basics

Web accessibility is the practice of making websites usable and convenient for all visitors, regardless of their physical or cognitive impairments, or limitations.

The online world should be fundamentally accessible to every user, and mastering web accessibility means following certain design principles to ensure people who experience difficulties can still access a positive online experience.

Used correctly, web accessibility guideline ensure people can understand, navigate, and interact with the pages and applications they encounter on the web. It involves addressing and responding to auditory, physical, visual, neurological, and other limitations.

What is ADA? The Americans with Disabilities Act

Web accessibility is governed by a variety of different standards, and regulatory groups. The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the crucial guidelines business leaders need to consider when designing their websites.

First entered into law in 1990, ADA, is a law that prohibits companies from discriminating against individuals with disabilities.

The goal of ADA is to ensure people with limitations have the same rights and access to experiences as everyone else. Companies building Shopify stores must ensure they’re following the guidelines laid out by ADA to guarantee and maintain compliance.

Why is Important to improve Accessibility of your Shopify Site?

Ultimately, every business needs an accessible website. Ensuring your online store, or Shopify website adheres to accessibility standards is crucial to maintaining compliance, and avoiding ADA lawsuits. However, it’s also a good way to boost the profitability of your site. 

In 2022, one report found more than 83% of websites had accessibility issues. This puts these companies at risk of compliance fines, but also means they’re missing out on up to $13 trillion in disposable income controlled by those with disabilities.

If everyone can’t access and use your store, then you miss out on potential conversion opportunities. What’s more, there appears to be a clear link between web accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO). Sites with clear, descriptive headings and excellent user experiences tend to rank higher than their competitors, benefiting from additional traffic.

Our Top 5 Shopify Accessibility Tips

The good news for Shopify store owners, is there are accessibility features built into Shopify, as well as guides you can follow to adhere to concepts like the “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines”. However, it’s still important to take extra steps to ensure your store is ADA compliant.

Here are our top tips for getting started.

Check Your Store for Accessibility

Before you can start making positive changes to your site’s accessibility score, you need to understand which issues you currently have. The easiest way to do this is to use a free website accessibility checker. There are various great tools out there, such as the ADA & WCAG compliant site accessibilitychecker.org.

These tools run a number of checks to help site owners pinpoint issues with things like contrast in color palettes, and navigation. While there are plenty of “accessibility enabler” tools, widgets, and plugins out there, you can examine the accessibility of your e-commerce store manually too.

For instance, you can load your store and use keyboard navigation to ensure you can move through your site without using a mouse.

Other things worth looking at include:

• Typography and font customization: To read text comfortably, some users will need to change how its displayed. Allowing your users to change the text size, font, color, and spacing is important to boost readability. You can zoom in on your browser to see whether content starts to overlap, or suffer from legibility issues.
• Your tabs: When a page loads, hover over the browser tab to ensure there’s a unique title that clearly explains the purpose and content of the web page. This will help users to navigate and understand your website pages more effectively.
• Error messages: Enter incorrect or problematic data into the forms on your website, such as your checkout forms. Make sure that the error messages that display to users are clear and provide directions on how to fix the problem.

Use Alt Text for All of Your Images

Adding alternative text to all of your visual media on Shopify is crucial for both accessibility, and improving your search engine optimization strategy. Your “alt text” is essentially a simple description of an image that screen readers can read aloud to visually impaired, or low vision individuals, or people with sensory processing or learning disorders.

Alt text helps to paint a comprehensive picture of a website page for people who can’t perceive images in the same way as others. To add alt text to your media on Shopify, you can use the page building tools for blogs, or the “Products” screen for product images.

If you’re adding alt text to a product, tap on a product and select a product image to see the “Preview” screen, then tap the three dots button. Choose “edit alt text” and enter your details. If you’re adding text to theme images, visit the Theme Editor, and click on the image that needs the alt text. Click “Edit” on the image, and enter the text into the “alt text” section.

Design Websites for “Sound Off”

These days, countless ecommerce website managers and business owners use video to help advertise their products or share information with visitors. If you’re using videos on your site, it’s important to remember that not everyone will be viewing your website with access to sound.

Additionally, some people may have auditory impairments that make it difficult for them to listen to the content you share on your website.

Whether you’re using video for your product pages, to showcase customer testimonials, or promotional purposes, make sure captions and transcriptions are included for everyone who can’t simply “listen” to your content.

Adding captions and descriptions of visuals to your video content can improve the experience for all users, not just those with auditory impairments. Remember, some customers will be viewing your content with their smartphones.

Around 75% of these consumers keep their phone on mute when watching a video. Transcriptions and captions will also allow you to use more keywords in your content, which could improve your search engine ranking potential.

Use Descriptive Headers and Links

If you’re utilizing search engine optimization strategies to increase traffic to your website, you should already be using headers and descriptive links on all of your website pages. To boost web accessibility and compliance, start by breaking large blocks of content on pages into smaller sections. Use headers in order (H2, followed by H3, for instance), to guide users through the page.

Remember, screen readers and assistive technologies will announce each of your subheadings to help users understand where they are on the page. You can also use other design strategies, like bold and italic font, to draw attention to specific words and phrases when they’re particularly important, or when you’re sharing a quote.

On top of using headers correctly, make sure your links are descriptive and clear. Descriptive links help users to understand exactly what they’ll accomplish by clicking on a link. People who use screen readers often navigate emails and other pages by going through each link to determine what they should click on. Creating links that are informative helps to drive positive action from your customers.

Use the right CTA (Call to Action) text too. For instance, instead of just saying “view our collection of new socks here”, try “click here to view our sock collection”.

Be Cautious with Color

Finally, color is one of the most important assets in your web design toolkit. Color psychology influences how people think and feel about your brand. For instance, blue is a color associated with trust, while green is connected with nature and wealth.

Color also helps to convey information, for instance, a red button draws attention to an asset on your page and signifies its importance. Using different colors for links on your pages also helps customers to identify which “anchor text” segments they can click on.

However, trying to convey information with color alone can be problematic. People with visual impairments can often miss color changes with “low contrast”. This is why it’s important to find other ways to make certain pieces of content stand out. For instance, you can underline or bold internal links to make them more visible.

You can also use online tools like the color contrast checker from WebAIM to help you identify pages that don’t comply with WCAG and ADA standards. Another option is to view your website in black and white, to determine whether you’d still be able to identify important parts of the page without the use of color.

Making Your Shopify Store ADA Compliant

Building a successful online store is about more than just choosing the right ecommerce platform and selling the right products. You also need to ensure your store is operable for all users, following the guidelines laid out for ADA and WCAG compliance.

Website owners that commit to optimizing accessibility reduce their risk of legal issues, and ensure they can improve the experience they deliver to their customers.

However, ensuring digital accessibility isn’t a one-time project. Every time you update your website, or add something new to your site, you need to ensure you’re not introducing new accessibility issues.

Regularly monitor your website for any potential problems, and make sure your store is accessible to every consumers, no matter their limitations or disabilities.