Shopify Store Sued Over Accessibility? What to Know and Do First

If you sell on Shopify and a demand letter or a lawsuit says your store is inaccessible to blind shoppers, you are in large company. By one industry count, 952 of the 2,045 website accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States in the first half of 2026, or about 47%, were against Shopify stores. New York was the third busiest state, with 399.

The lawsuit names your business, not Shopify. Shopify’s terms of service say you are responsible for “the creation and operation” of your store and its content, and that you will comply with all applicable laws. A well-built theme helps, but the store a customer actually uses is your theme settings, your product photos and descriptions, and the apps you have added, and those are yours.

These suits are usually brought under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In New York they often add state and city law claims, which is where the requests for money come from. See why an ADA lawsuit asks for money.

Shopify does real work on accessibility. Its accessibility statement says it tests against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the standard these cases are measured against, and it publishes conformance reports for its checkout, its admin and its Dawn theme. Themes sold in the Shopify Theme Store have to meet accessibility requirements, including an average Lighthouse accessibility score of at least 90 across the home, product, collection and cart pages, plus manual checks for keyboard use, form labels, alt text, color contrast and visible focus.

None of that covers everything on your store:

• Your theme as you changed it. Shopify’s statement says merchants have complete control over their theme code. Custom sections, colors you picked and code a developer added can undo what the theme got right.
• Your content. Product photos without alt text, size charts posted as images, videos without captions and PDF catalogs are all yours.
• Your apps. Pop-ups, reviews, upsells, wishlists, chat and quiz apps add their own code to your pages, and each one can add barriers of its own.
• Automated scores. A Lighthouse score is an automated check. It can’t test everything a person using a screen reader or a keyboard runs into, so a good score is a starting point, not proof.

Website complaints in New York usually say a blind person using a screen reader tried to shop on the site and couldn’t. The barriers they list are familiar, and on Shopify stores they tend to show up in the same places:

• Product images with no alt text, or alt text that just repeats the product name. Shopify lets you add alt text to each product image in the admin.
• Color and size swatches that can’t be reached or selected with a keyboard, or don’t say which option is chosen.
• Email sign-up pop-ups that trap the keyboard or can’t be closed without a mouse.
• Cart drawers, menus and sliders that a keyboard or screen reader can’t operate.
• Forms without labels, low color contrast and missing focus outlines.
• Videos without captions and size charts or ingredient lists posted only as images.

An accessibility app won’t stop the suit. By the same industry count, 496 of the first-half 2026 lawsuits, about a quarter, were against sites that already had an accessibility widget or overlay installed. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe, one of the best-known widget makers, to pay $1 million over claims that its AI tool could make any website compliant. See what an accessibility widget does and doesn’t do.

Find your deadline first. In federal court you generally have 21 days after you are served to answer or move to dismiss. In New York State court it is 20 days if the papers were handed to you personally in New York and 30 days if you were served another way. A deadline in a demand letter is set by the plaintiff’s law firm, not by a court, but it still deserves an answer. See what to do in the first 48 hours after a demand letter.

Don’t rush to change the site or install an app before you talk to a lawyer. Fixes matter, but the timing, how complete they are and the records you keep all affect how a case ends. See should you fix your website before or after responding.

Look at who sued you. A few New York firms bring most of these cases, and each has its own pattern. We have written about Gottlieb & Associates, Mizrahi Kroub, Shaked Law Group, Joseph & Norinsberg and Equal Access Law Group.

Two questions that matter for online-only stores. Courts disagree on whether the ADA covers a website with no physical store, and the Second Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers New York, hasn’t settled it, so it can be a defense but not a sure one. See does the ADA apply to an online-only business. And if your business isn’t in New York, whether a New York court can hear the case is its own question: see sued in New York but your business is in another state.

1. Try your own store with only a keyboard. Use the Tab key to go from the home page to a product, pick a size and color, add it to the cart and reach checkout. If you get stuck, or can’t see where you are, so can a screen reader user.
2. Fill in alt text for every product image in the Shopify admin, describing what the photo shows, not just the product name.
3. Review every installed app. Remove the ones you don’t use, and check the pop-up, reviews and chat apps with the keyboard test above.
4. Caption your videos and put size charts and key product details in text, not only in images.
5. Get a manual audit against WCAG 2.2 Level AA and fix what it finds in the store itself. See what it costs to make a website ADA accessible.
6. Keep dated records of the audit, the fixes and ongoing testing. If you are ever sued, documented work can matter a great deal.

Michael Samuel has defended about 100 ADA cases since 2019, most of them about websites. For website cases, the firm charges a flat fee that covers all work up to trial, including a motion to dismiss.

If you have received a demand letter or been sued over your Shopify store, call (212) 563-9884 before your deadline, or upload the complaint to our free complaint checker for a plain-English summary first. More on how these cases are handled is on our ADA website lawsuit defense page.