ADA Compliance for E-Commerce Websites: 2026 Checklist

If you sell online, accessibility is not an edge case for your business. It is the center of the litigation map. E-commerce is the single most sued category in US web accessibility litigation, and the gap between it and every other industry is enormous. The good news is that the failures that generate demand letters against online stores are concentrated in a handful of predictable places, and most of them are fixable without rebuilding your site.

We already have a dedicated WCAG checklist for Shopify stores that covers Shopify's specific theme and app behavior. This guide is the platform-agnostic version for everyone else: WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix Stores, Squarespace Commerce, Magento, and custom builds. The legal exposure is identical across platforms; only the implementation details differ.

How much of the lawsuit volume is e-commerce

According to UsableNet's 2025 litigation data, e-commerce accounted for close to 70 percent of all ADA web accessibility lawsuits, making it the clear leader among all industries by a wide margin. Among the top 500 e-commerce retailers, more than a third had received at least one ADA accessibility lawsuit. Across the full year, total digital accessibility lawsuits across federal and state courts passed 5,000.

The reason e-commerce dominates is simple. An online store is a place of public accommodation that a customer interacts with entirely through the website, so an inaccessible checkout is not an inconvenience, it is a complete denial of the service. Courts and plaintiff firms both understand that, which is why a retail store front is the highest-value target for an automated accessibility scan.

Does my online store legally have to be accessible?

For practical purposes in the United States, yes. The controlling precedent for connected e-commerce is Robles v. Domino's Pizza, 913 F.3d 898 (9th Cir. 2019), in which the Ninth Circuit held that the ADA applied to Domino's website and mobile app because they connected customers to the goods and services of its physical stores. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving the ruling in place. State laws in California and New York then layered money damages on top of the federal claim, which is what turned accessibility from a compliance checkbox into a litigation business.

The five e-commerce failures that generate the most demand letters

Across platforms, the same five failure categories show up again and again in e-commerce complaints. Fix these first.

• Product images without alt text. A screen reader user shopping by product cannot tell your listings apart if every image announces as the filename or nothing at all. This is the single most cited e-commerce barrier.
• Checkout and contact forms without labels. A form field with placeholder text but no programmatic label is invisible to a screen reader at the exact moment the customer is trying to pay. An inaccessible checkout is a complete denial of service and the strongest possible claim.
• Modal dialogs that trap or lose focus. Quick-view product modals, size-guide popups, and cart drawers that do not move keyboard focus into the dialog, or do not return it on close, strand keyboard and screen-reader users.
• Low color contrast on price and sale text. Sale prices rendered in light gray or a thin accent color frequently fail the 4.5 to 1 contrast minimum, and price is exactly the information a shopper needs to read.
• Carousels and sliders with keyboard traps. Product image carousels and homepage hero sliders built on older libraries often cannot be operated or escaped with a keyboard.

Platform by platform: what your vendor controls and what you control

Every hosted platform ships a reasonably accessible base, and every store breaks parts of it through customization. Knowing which side of the line a problem sits on tells you whether you fix it or your theme vendor does.

WooCommerce (WordPress)

WooCommerce inherits the accessibility of your WordPress theme, which varies enormously. The platform core is reasonable, but the typical failure sources are third-party page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery) that generate non-semantic markup, plugins that inject inaccessible widgets, and themes that were never tested with a screen reader. Because the stack is so customizable, WooCommerce stores tend to have the widest spread of accessibility quality. You control the theme, the page builder, and every plugin you add, so most of the responsibility is yours.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce's Stencil themes are generally well structured, but custom theme edits and the apps you install from the marketplace are where problems enter. Quick-view modals, faceted-search filters, and injected marketing widgets are the common offenders. As with every platform, the storefront you ship is your responsibility even when the theme started accessible.

Wix Stores and Squarespace Commerce

Wix and Squarespace both publish accessibility features and reasonably accessible templates, but the drag-and-drop freedom that makes them popular also makes it easy to create barriers: images added without alt text, text placed over busy backgrounds at failing contrast, and custom code blocks that bypass the platform's built-in semantics. The templates give you a head start; the content choices are still yours to get right.

Magento and custom builds

Custom and Magento storefronts have no platform safety net at all. Accessibility is entirely a function of how the front end was built, which means it depends on your developers having tested against WCAG 2.1 AA during the build. These stores need the most thorough testing because nothing is accessible by default.

Checkout is the highest-risk surface in your funnel

If you fix only one thing, make the entire purchase path operable with a keyboard and usable with a screen reader, from product page to cart to payment to confirmation. Every form field needs a programmatic label, every error message needs to be announced and tied to the field it describes, and focus needs to move logically through the flow. An inaccessible product page is a problem; an inaccessible checkout is the case, because it denies the core service the business exists to provide.

Third-party widgets and popups

The scripts you add for marketing and support are a frequent source of barriers because they inject content you did not author and cannot fully control. Email and discount popups (Klaviyo, Privy, Mailchimp), live chat and support widgets, product review modules, and cookie-consent banners all commonly trap focus, lack labels, or appear without announcing themselves. Test each one with a keyboard and a screen reader, and hold the vendor to an accessibility answer before you install it. Note that accessibility overlay widgets are not a fix here: 2025 litigation data shows lawsuits continuing against sites that have a widget installed.

An actionable 10-point e-commerce WCAG 2.1 AA checklist

1. Add descriptive alt text to every product image and every informational graphic. Decorative images get an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them.
2. Give every form field a programmatic label, especially in checkout, account creation, and contact forms.
3. Make the entire checkout flow operable with a keyboard alone, with no mouse.
4. Ensure error messages are announced to screen readers and tied to the field they describe.
5. Check color contrast on body text, sale prices, and button labels against the 4.5 to 1 minimum.
6. Confirm modals (quick-view, size guides, cart drawers) move focus in on open and return it on close.
7. Verify product carousels and hero sliders can be operated and escaped with a keyboard.
8. Give every link and button discernible text, including icon-only buttons (wishlist hearts, close icons, social links).
9. Test every third-party popup and widget for keyboard and screen-reader access before and after installing it.
10. Re-scan on a schedule, because theme updates, new apps, and seasonal campaigns introduce new barriers after launch.

For the underlying standard behind this list, our guide to the WCAG 2.1 AA criteria that actually matter explains each category in plain language. And if you are weighing the cost of doing this work against the cost of ignoring it, the ADA website lawsuit cost breakdown does the math.