How to avoid an ADA accessibility lawsuit when your store runs on Shopify
Over 4,000 lawsuits a year in the US, mostly against small businesses and online stores. What plaintiffs' lawyers look for, what you can fix from the Shopify admin, and what you cannot.
· Rampa
The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) dates from 1990 and does not mention websites. Since 2017 federal courts have applied it to online stores anyway, and every year more than 4,000 web accessibility lawsuits are filed. Most are not against Amazon: they target small businesses, because those settle quickly for $5,000 to $25,000 plus legal fees.
Shopify stores are a frequent target for a simple reason: there are many of them, they look alike, and the same failures repeat from one to the next. A firm that already won a case against a Shopify store knows exactly what to look for in the next one.
What they check before filing
Nobody has to buy anything. The usual procedure is to run an automated tool on the home page, a product page and the cart, and attach the result to the complaint. What almost always shows up:
- Product photos without alt text (the description a screen reader reads out).
- Icon-only buttons (cart, search, close) with no name.
- Light grey text on white that fails minimum contrast.
- Checkout or newsletter fields without a label.
- Page language not declared, or declared wrong.
All of that is measurable with the same tool they will use against you, and all of it can be fixed first.
What you can fix from the Shopify admin, no code
- Alt text on photos: Products → the product → click the image → "Edit alt text". A sentence that says what is shown ("Blue running shoe, side view"), not keywords.
- Store title and language: Settings → Languages, and Online Store → Preferences for the title.
- Color contrast: Online Store → Themes → Customize → Theme settings → Colors. Darken secondary text until it passes 4.5:1.
What the admin cannot fix: names for icon buttons, heading order, unlabeled fields inside the theme. That lives in the theme code (Online Store → Themes → Edit code) and is an hour or two of work for someone who knows it, if they have the corrected code in front of them.
What does not work: the accessibility widget
There are Shopify apps that promise "automatic compliance" with a floating button. They do not change your store's code: the photos still have no description. Lawsuits in 2024 and 2025 include stores that had one installed, and in April 2025 the FTC fined one of those vendors $1 million for claiming its script made sites compliant.
What does protect you
Fixing what the tool finds, keeping a dated record of every check and fix, and publishing an accessibility statement with a way to contact you. A lawyer who sees that knows the case will not settle fast, and moves on to another store.