Browsify: Accessible — Accessibility Compliance Toolkit

Accessibility problems don't generate support tickets. A keyboard-only user who hits a form field they can't tab into doesn't email you to complain — they just leave. A screen-reader user who lands on a product image with no alt text has no idea what they were about to buy, so they close the tab. You never see it happen, and it never shows up as a "bug." It just shows up as a slightly lower conversion rate that nobody can explain.

• Broken keyboard navigation: Shoppers who can't use a mouse — due to motor impairment or simply preference — tab through your page. If focus gets trapped or skips the "Add to cart" button, checkout is a dead end for them, full stop.
• Missing alt text: Every product photo without a description is invisible to a screen reader. On a visual-heavy store — fashion, jewelry, home goods — that can mean the entire product catalog is effectively unbrowsable for blind and low-vision shoppers.
• Low color contrast: Light gray text on a white background might look clean to you, but for the roughly 1 in 12 men with color vision deficiency, or anyone using a phone in sunlight, it's unreadable.

None of this is exotic. It's the default state of most Shopify themes, straight out of the box.

The European Accessibility Act became legally enforceable on June 28, 2025, and by mid-2026 EU member states are actively running audits and issuing penalties — not just publishing guidance. If your store sells to customers in the EU, this applies to you regardless of where your business is based.

The penalties vary by member state, but they're not symbolic: fines can reach up to 4% of revenue or €100,000, depending on jurisdiction. And the trigger isn't necessarily a customer complaint — audits can be initiated by national market surveillance authorities on their own.

The stores that get flagged first tend to be the ones that never gave accessibility a second thought: no alt text on any product image, contrast ratios well below the legal minimum, and a checkout flow that silently breaks for anyone not using a mouse.

Waiting to see if enforcement "actually happens" to stores your size is a bet, not a strategy — and it's a bet against a regulation that's already in force.

Browsify: Accessible scans your live storefront the way a real screen-reader user or keyboard-only shopper experiences it, then fixes what it safely can and flags what needs a human decision:

• Color contrast: Automatically detects text and UI elements that fall below accessible contrast ratios and adjusts them to pass, without you having to redesign your theme.
• Alt text: Finds every product and content image missing alt text and generates accurate descriptions automatically, so your catalog stops being invisible to screen readers.
• ARIA labels: Adds the missing labels that tell assistive technology what a button, form field, or menu actually does — the difference between "button" and "Add to cart, $48.00."
• Keyboard navigation: Identifies where tab order breaks, where focus gets trapped, and where interactive elements can't be reached without a mouse — including the checkout flow itself — and repairs the underlying markup.

Anything that needs a judgment call — like a decorative image versus one that needs a real description — gets flagged for you to review instead of silently guessed at.

Any store with EU or UK customers falls under the EAA, but the risk is sharpest for stores that lean heavily on visuals to sell: fashion, jewelry, furniture, home decor. These are exactly the catalogs most likely to have zero alt text on hundreds of product images, because the product photo was always meant to "speak for itself" — which it can't do for a shopper who can't see it.

If you're already selling into the EU, or planning to, treating accessibility as a one-time developer favor instead of an ongoing, scanned, and monitored part of your store is how stores end up finding out about a problem from a regulator instead of from us.