What should an agency check in a Shopify theme before promising accessibility?

Before you promise a client an accessible storefront, check four things in the actual theme: keyboard operability, focus visibility, color contrast, and form error handling. Most Shopify themes fail at least one of these out of the box.

Keyboard and focus order

Unplug the mouse and tab through the homepage, a product page, and checkout. Every interactive element should be reachable, and the tab order should follow the visual layout. The most common failure is a visible focus indicator that the theme CSS removed. If you cannot see where you are, a keyboard user cannot either. Check that dropdown menus, the cart drawer, and the mobile menu all open and close from the keyboard, and that focus does not get trapped inside a modal.

Color contrast in the real theme

Do not trust the theme demo. Check the client's actual colors, because brand palettes are where contrast dies. Sale badges, announcement bars, and button text on accent backgrounds are the usual offenders. Test body text, secondary text, links, and placeholder text against WCAG 2.2 contrast ratios. Placeholder text that doubles as a label is a double failure: low contrast and no persistent label.

Forms and error messages

Submit the newsletter signup and the contact form with empty fields. Errors must be described in text, linked to the field they belong to, and announced to assistive technology. A red border alone is not an error message. Also confirm every input has a visible, persistent label. Themes that rely on placeholder-only labels fail this on every form they ship.

Write down what you found before you promise anything

The point of this check is not to fix everything in an afternoon. It is to know the size of the job before you put a promise in a proposal. Document each failure with the page, the component, and a screenshot. That list becomes the scope of the remediation project, and it protects both you and the client when the demand letter conversation happens later. A theme that passes these four checks is rare, which is exactly why checking first is the responsible move.