In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of lawsuits filed in response to inaccessible websites. As a developer who works primarily with Shopify, I have seen an increase in questions from merchants related to accessibility, some of them from merchants who were facing lawsuits themselves.
As Shopify is popular with small business owners who can’t afford a custom-built store, I began to wonder about the state of Shopify themes. What sort of options were out there for a merchant looking to purchase an existing theme from the theme store, and what could I safely recommend to merchants so they could have an accessible storefront from the beginning? I decided I would conduct some basic accessibility testing of all the themes on the homepage of the theme store to get an overview of what the theme landscape looked like.