What should an agency include in a quarterly accessibility review for Shopify clients?

A quarterly review is how an agency proves the accessibility work held up after launch. It is not a fresh full audit every 90 days. It is a disciplined check of what changed, what regressed, and what still needs fixing, packaged so the client can file it and forget it until next quarter.

Start with everything that changed since last quarter

Pull the change log before you run a single scan. Theme updates, app installs and uninstalls, new page templates, navigation changes, and content overhauls are where regressions hide. Ask the client what shipped, then verify against the theme version history and the installed app list, because clients forget. A review anchored to changes catches the breakage a generic re-scan can miss, and it gives every finding a probable cause.

Document the change list at the top of the review. When a demand letter arrives a year later, the question will be what the site looked like on a specific date, and the change log is what lets you reconstruct it. Agencies that keep this habit spend hours on evidence gathering instead of weeks.

Re-run the automated scans and diff against the baseline

Run the same automated scan configuration you used last quarter, on the same set of templates. The value is in the diff, not the raw count: new failures, fixed failures, and recurring failures each tell a different story. New failures point at recent changes. Recurring failures point at fixes that did not stick or templates nobody owns.

Do not present raw violation counts to the client without context. A count that went from 40 to 12 is a win worth naming; a count that went from 12 to 14 after a theme update is a regression with a cause. Clients remember trends, not tallies. Keep the raw exports in the file for the record, and put the trend in the summary.

Manual spot checks on the pages that make money

Automated scans miss the issues that cost clients the most: keyboard traps in the mega menu, a checkout step that loses focus, a product configurator that only works with a mouse. Every quarter, walk the money path by keyboard alone: homepage to search to product to cart to checkout. Then do one screen reader pass over a single representative template, rotating which template each quarter so coverage compounds over the year.

Time-box this work. A focused 60 to 90 minute pass over the critical path finds the issues that matter. The goal is not exhaustive manual testing every quarter; that is what the annual deep audit is for. The quarterly pass exists to catch the embarrassing, customer-facing breakage early.

Review the app stack for new injections

Every app installed since the last review gets a first scan of the markup it injects. Review widgets, upsell apps, size guides, chat tools, and subscription widgets are the usual suspects, because they render customer-facing controls across many templates at once. One bad app update can undo a quarter of remediation in a night.

When you find an app-caused issue, report it to the vendor with specifics: the failing markup, the template, and a capture of the failing state. Vendors fix reported issues far faster than vague complaints. Keep the ticket numbers in the review file. If a vendor will not fix an accessibility defect, that belongs in the client summary as a risk the client accepted, in writing.

Write the client summary in plain language

The client summary is one page: what improved, what regressed, what is still open, and what happens next, each with a date. No WCAG criterion numbers without a translation. Translate every finding into customer impact: who cannot do what, on which page. A client who understands the summary approves the fixes; a client who gets a raw scan export files it unread.

End the summary with next quarter's watch list: the risky changes coming up, like a planned theme migration or a holiday code freeze, and what the agency will check when they land. This turns the review from a backward-looking report into a forward-looking plan, which is what makes clients renew the retainer.

File the evidence where the client can find it

Deliver the review as a dated PDF plus the raw scan exports, stored in a shared folder the client controls, not just in the agency's project tool. Name files with dates. If the client ever needs to show a pattern of diligence, perhaps to a plaintiff's attorney or an insurer, the file naming does half the work.

Keep your own copy too, for the length of the client relationship plus three years. Agencies get named in demand letters when the client points at the vendor. A filed quarterly review is the difference between a difficult conversation and an indefensible one.