The Audit No One Wants Until They Need It: How an Accessibility Overhaul Removed Legal Risk and Added 12% More Customers
eBizTrait made a mid-sized retailer’s Shopify store WCAG 2.1 AA compliant – closing off legal exposure and opening the store to an underserved segment of shoppers in the same project.
Results At A Glance
-
WCAG 2.1 AA
Compliance Level
achieved & documented
-
+12%
Addressable Traffic
assistive-tech users
-
0
Demand Letters Since
launch, 14 months
-
94/100
Accessibility Scoret
Lighthouse audit
The Challenge
MedEase Essentials received a demand letter alleging their Shopify store was inaccessible to screen-reader users, in violation of the ADA – the kind of letter that had become almost routine across ecommerce, with thousands of similar suits filed against online retailers each year. Their existing counsel resolved the immediate claim, but the underlying problem remained: the store genuinely was inaccessible.
An initial scan found the scale of the issue: product images with no alt text, a checkout flow that couldn’t be completed via keyboard navigation alone, colour-contrast failures across half the site’s buttons, and a mega-menu that trapped screen-reader focus so severely that a blind user testing the site couldn’t navigate past the homepage.
Beyond the legal exposure, the business case was straightforward: over 1 in 4 U.S. adults live with a disability, and a meaningful share of MedEase’s own core customer base – people managing chronic health conditions – skewed toward higher rates of visual and motor impairment than the general population. They were actively excluding a segment of their most relevant customers.
Our Approach
We ran a full WCAG 2.1 AA conformance audit combining automated scanning (which catches roughly a third of real accessibility issues) with manual testing: full keyboard-only navigation of every core flow, and testing with NVDA and VoiceOver screen readers by team members experienced in assistive technology.
Rather than treating this as a checklist of technical fixes, we treated it as a UX redesign constraint applied across the entire store – every component, from mega-menu to checkout to size-selector, had to be rebuilt to be genuinely operable by keyboard and screen reader, not just technically compliant on paper.
We documented every fix against the specific WCAG success criterion it addressed, producing an audit trail the client’s legal counsel could point to – because in accessibility work, the paper trail matters almost as much as the fix itself.
What We Built
- Full WCAG 2.1 AA conformance audit across 40+ page templates and all core purchase flows, manual + automated testing
- Keyboard-navigable mega-menu and mobile menu rebuild – eliminating focus traps and ensuring logical tab ordet
- Screen-reader remediation: semantic HTML restructuring, ARIA labelling audit and correction, and skip-navigation links added
- Colour-contrast remediation across buttons, form fields, and text – every combination brought to a minimum 4.5:1 ratio
- Fully keyboard-operable checkout flow, including payment method selection and error-message association with form fields
- Alt-text audit and remediation across the full product catalog, with an editorial guideline delivered for future product uploads
- Accessible custom components rebuilt: size selectors, image galleries, accordion FAQs, and quantity steppers
- Accessibility statement page and ongoing-conformance documentation package delivered for the client’s legal record
Technologies Used
Results – Before & After
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| WCAG 2.1 AA Conformance | Non-conformant | Conformant |
| Lighthouse Accessibility Score | 61 | 94 |
| Keyboard-Operable Checkout | No | Yes |
| Legal Demand Letters (14 months post-fix) | 2 prior claims | 0 |
| Assistive-Technology Session Completion Rate | Not tracked pre-fix | 89% |
| Estimated Addressable Traffic Gain | – | +12% |
“We went into this thinking about legal risk and came out thinking about it as a customer experience gap we’d been blind to – no pun intended. We had customers who couldn’t complete a purchase on our site and we didn’t even know it. Fixing it was the right thing to do, and it turned out to be good business too.”
– Head of Digital, MedEase Essentials
Key Takeaway
Shopify accessibility work sits at a rare intersection of legal necessity and genuine commercial opportunity. WCAG conformance isn’t a checkbox exercise – done properly, it closes real legal exposure while opening the store to a segment of shoppers, many with real purchasing power, who are routinely excluded by default ecommerce design.
Ready to achieve similar results?
