Ten things to check on your storefront before an accessibility demand letter finds them for you.
ADA web accessibility demand letters against e-commerce stores are usually built from a handful of automated WCAG 2.1 findings, not a manual audit. That means most of what a plaintiff's firm cites, you can check and fix yourself. Here's what to look at first, roughly in the order scanners and lawyers find it.
Every <img> on a product page needs a descriptive alt attribute — not a filename, not an empty string. This is WCAG Success Criterion 1.1.1 (Non-text Content), and it's the single most-cited failure in ADA demand letters because it's trivial to detect automatically at scale.
Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background (3:1 for large text), per WCAG 1.4.3. Low-contrast gray-on-white price tags and "sale" badges are a common miss on Shopify themes.
Every interactive element — add-to-cart, filters, the cart drawer, checkout fields — must be reachable and operable with Tab/Enter alone. Custom carousels and modal cart drawers are the usual failure point.
Every input (email signup, search, checkout) needs a programmatically associated <label>, not just a placeholder. Placeholder-only forms fail WCAG 1.3.1 and 4.1.2.
Pages should have one <h1> and a logical heading order after it. Many themes skip straight to styled <div>s instead of real headings, which breaks screen-reader navigation.
Don't ship outline: none without replacing it with a visible focus style — it's the most common accidental accessibility regression from theme customization.
Product demo videos need captions or a text transcript (WCAG 1.2.2) if they carry information not available elsewhere on the page.
"Click here" and "read more" links fail WCAG 2.4.4 in context. Link text should describe the destination on its own.
The page should stay usable at 200% browser zoom without horizontal scrolling or overlapping content (WCAG 1.4.10).
A short, honest page describing your accessibility efforts and a contact method for issues won't prevent a lawsuit, but it signals good faith and gives you a paper trail.
If you only have time for one thing: alt-text. It's the highest-volume, easiest-to-prove finding, and unlike contrast or keyboard-nav issues it can be checked and estimated automatically across your whole catalog in one pass.
Already received an actual demand letter? See what to do first. Ready to fix what the scan finds? See how to bulk add alt text across your whole catalog.
This checklist is a technical starting point, not legal advice. For an actual ADA demand letter or lawsuit, talk to a lawyer familiar with digital accessibility.