Overview
Search “accessibility” in the Shopify App Store and you get dozens of results promising compliance for a monthly fee. This page sorts them into what they actually do, which ones earn a place in your stack, and where a human audit is the only tool that works.
The platform-level picture is in Does Shopify have built-in ADA compliance?
The three kinds of apps
Overlay widgets. Add a floating accessibility button and attempt browser-side repairs. The problems are covered in overlay widgets don’t make you compliant. Short version: they do not fix your store, users dislike them, and the FTC fined the biggest vendor for its compliance claims.
Scanner apps. Run automated checks, usually built on the axe engine, and report failures: missing alt text, contrast violations, unlabeled buttons. These are honest tools with a known ceiling. They catch the machine-detectable subset, which is quantified in why automated tools miss most issues.
Utility apps. Narrow tools that help you do real work. Batch alt-text editors are the main example. They change your actual store content, which puts them in a different category from overlays: they are labor-savers for genuine fixes rather than substitutes for them.
What no app can do
An app cannot tell you whether your checkout works for a screen reader user. It can only tell you whether certain attributes exist. The gap between those two things is where lawsuits live:
- Alt text that exists but says “IMG_2041.jpg” passes every scanner.
- A focus order that jumps from header to footer and back passes every scanner.
- A popup with a close button that no keyboard can reach passes most scanners.
- A variant picker that announces nothing when you change sizes passes most scanners.
Every item on the common failures list needs a human to verify the fix actually works with real assistive technology.
The stack that makes sense
- A human audit establishes ground truth: what is broken, where, and how to fix it. See what a real audit looks like.
- Your team fixes the findings, using the step-by-step guide as the working order.
- A scanner app then becomes genuinely useful, as a regression alarm that catches new machine-detectable issues when you change themes or install apps.
- Re-audit periodically, because your store drifts with every update.
Apps are maintenance tools. The audit is the map. Run the tools without the map and you patrol a third of the territory while the rest stays dark.
Example
A store owner installs a scanner app, fixes all 40 reported issues over a weekend, and sees the dashboard hit zero. Two months later a demand letter arrives citing a keyboard-trapped quick-view modal and a checkout that loses focus after every field. Neither issue is machine-detectable, so the dashboard stayed green the whole time. The owner did nothing wrong with the scanner; the scanner just was never measuring those things.
Common mistake
Watching the scanner’s issue count drop to zero and concluding the store is compliant. Zero scanner issues means zero machine-detectable issues, roughly the easiest third of the problem. The remaining two-thirds is exactly the part plaintiffs demonstrate in complaints, which is why scanner-clean stores keep getting sued.