ADA website compliance
This is general information, not legal advice.
Shoppers search for ADA website compliance when a store blocks them, or when a letter names the Americans with Disabilities Act. AltGrade shows the broken parts of the shop and how to fix them in the theme. It does not decide a legal claim.
Read ADA.gov first
The U.S. Department of Justice publishes ADA materials at https://www.ada.gov/. Start there. Title III is the part businesses usually meet in these conversations. Whether it applies to your site is a question for your lawyer.
The engineering work is separate. A keyboard user who cannot open the menu cannot buy. A pale price disappears in sunlight. A product photo with no name is invisible to a screen reader. Fix those in the theme and the catalogue. That is what the scan is for.
What breaks on a store
Product photos are the usual first failure. Shopify and most upload tools copy the file name into the alt field. banner-final.jpg is not a product name. An empty alt on the image inside the buy link is worse: the link has no name at all.
Colour swatches with no text fail the same way. So does a sale price in light grey on white. WCAG 1.4.3 asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text. Measure the price against the card behind it, not against a brand colour sitting somewhere else on the page.
Checkout fails when the only label is placeholder text, when an error is only a red border, or when a sticky bar covers the focused field. Menus that open only on hover block anyone without a mouse. These patterns repeat on every product. Fix the template once.
Find them in an afternoon
Scan the live shop, not a passworded preview. The free scan covers up to 10 pages: home, menu targets, a product, the cart, the start of checkout, contact, and a journal page when those URLs exist. You get a score and the top five issue groups on screen.
Then check three things the scanner will not judge. Read the alt text out loud and ask if it names the product. Tab from the top of a product page to the pay button and watch the focus. Mute the hero video and see if the offer is still on screen. That is half an hour of work and it catches what automation misses.
What you get from AltGrade
Each finding is plain English, with steps for Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow or BigCommerce when the scanner recognises the platform. The free scan needs no account. The one-off audit is £49 for up to 50 pages, a PDF, and a statement draft you edit before you publish it. Monitoring starts at £19 a month.
Paid plans keep the score by date, so a theme update that brings an empty button back shows up in the next email. Hand that history to a developer or a client. Do not hand it to a court as a legal conclusion. If a demand letter has arrived, read that page and call a lawyer before you reply.
Questions
Does a scan mean the site meets the ADA?
No. You get a fix list. Your lawyer answers questions about the ADA and about any letter you have received.
Do you install a widget?
No. You change the theme, the product data, or the content. The page itself gets better.
What should we fix first?
Anything that blocks the purchase: unnamed buttons, checkout fields with no label, and a price people cannot read.
What will the scan miss?
Automated scans cannot catch every WCAG issue. A person still checks whether the alt text is true and whether checkout makes sense when it is heard.