Overview
You can find your store’s loudest accessibility problems in under an hour, for free, with no special skills. This page is the full sequence. It works on any platform: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or custom.
A shorter Shopify-flavored version exists as the 10-minute self-check; this one goes wider. The complete criteria reference is the WCAG checklist.
Test 1: The keyboard walkthrough (20 minutes)
Put the mouse away. Using only Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Escape, and the arrow keys:
- Land on your home page. Can you see which element has focus at every step? If focus is invisible, that alone fails WCAG 2.4.7.
- Open the menu and reach a product page.
- Pick a variant, add to cart, open the cart.
- Proceed through checkout to the payment page.
- If a popup appears at any point: can you close it with Escape, or Tab to its close button? A popup you cannot escape is a keyboard trap, one of the most-cited failures in ADA complaints.
Any point where you get stuck or lost, a real customer gets stuck too. Write each one down as you go; the notes become your fix list.
Test 2: Zoom (5 minutes)
Press Ctrl or Cmd and plus until the browser reaches 200%. Text should reflow, nothing should overlap, and no horizontal scrollbar should appear in a phone-width window. Broken zoom fails criteria 1.4.4 and 1.4.10.
Test 3: Contrast (10 minutes)
Pick your body text, helper text, price text, and button text. Check each against its background with any free contrast checker. Normal text needs 4.5:1. Gray helper text and pastel sale badges are the usual failures. The detailed walkthrough is color contrast in Shopify themes.
Test 4: Forms (10 minutes)
Look at your newsletter signup, login, and checkout fields. Does every field keep a visible label when filled in, or does the placeholder vanish and leave you guessing what goes where? Submit a form with deliberate errors: does the error message say which field failed and why, or just turn something red?
Test 5: The scanner pass (10 minutes)
Run WAVE or axe on your home, product, and cart pages. Fix what it flags: missing alt text, empty buttons, contrast failures. Then remember what a green result means. Scanners see roughly a third of the problem space, as measured in why automated tools miss most issues.
What DIY cannot do
Two things. It cannot test real screen reader behavior, like whether your variant picker announces “Size, Medium, selected” or just “button.” And it cannot document itself: the dated, third-party report that deters lawsuits and anchors settlements requires an actual audit.
Example
An owner runs the full sequence on a Saturday morning. The keyboard walkthrough finds a quick-view modal that traps focus. Zoom breaks the collection grid. The contrast checker fails the beige sale badge. The scanner adds 60 missing alt texts. One hour of testing produced a complete, prioritized weekend fix list, at a cost of zero dollars.
Common mistake
Running the tests once and filing the results away. Your store changes weekly: new apps, new banners, theme updates. Put the keyboard walkthrough on a calendar. After every significant change, and once a quarter minimum, or the store you tested stops being the store you run.