Caring about accessibility is the easy part

Christopher Phillips asked on WebAIM's blog this spring why we keep tolerating inaccessible websites^*. He argues the gap is cultural and moral more than technical. For a large organization with an accessibility team and a budget, he's right, but the case is less clear for smaller companies that have neither.

But first, the numbers. WebAIM's yearly scan of the top million home pages found 95.9% failing checks that software can catch. The average page had 56.1 errors, up from 51 the year before^*. The guidelines behind those checks date to December 2008^*. Almost eighteen years in, we went backwards.

From my perspective running a Shopify agency, it looks less like indifference and more like triage. Something more urgent always comes up, and accessibility slips, for owners, developers and agencies like us. We believe accessibility has to be continuous and automatic, or it doesn't last. That takes a system that checks the store as it changes and fixes what it finds, with your approval or on its own.

Someone has to pay for it

I run Hunni Development, and we've worked on more than a hundred stores, from full builds to small fixes. I can't name one owner who would shrug at hearing that a blind customer couldn't check out. They care. They also have a sale on Friday.

Every accessibility fix is an investment by somebody, and we've found it comes in three currencies: time, money and know-how. Usually all three at once.

For a merchant, it's time. A good description for a product photo takes a minute or two to write, on top of the shoot, the copy and the pricing. Across a catalog of a few hundred products, that's days of work, and for the most part it goes unnoticed.

For a developer, it's unbilled hours. Testing a store properly means a keyboard, a screen reader or two, and an afternoon per template. Even at an agency that cares, those hours are hard to justify when the client hasn't asked for them.

For the owner, it's money that could go anywhere else. When we offered clients a new feature or an accessibility pass, they picked the feature about nineteen times out of twenty. Accessibility is usually only tackled when there's spare time, but there's never spare time.

And for everyone, it's complexity. The rules live in WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which list dozens of detailed requirements, each with its own exceptions. They can feel like a maze, even to people who fix accessibility for a living. A merchant who wants to do the right thing has to learn this new language or pay for expertise.

Every owner is weighing profit against compliance. You can care about accessibility a great deal, but when it's time to choose, the bottom line usually wins. So it gets pushed.

Paid once, gone in a quarter

Worse, a store doesn't stay accessible on its own. Even the stores we built carefully wore down, one routine update at a time. Someone pasted a size chart from a Google Doc. Someone uploaded a batch of product photos and skipped the descriptions. An app added a chat button with no label. Each took a few seconds, and each person was just doing their job.

So the next time we proposed an accessibility pass, the client asked a fair question: didn't we already pay for this?

Meanwhile, the onus is transferred to the shopper. A blind customer pages through the product photos and hears file names read aloud, with no way to tell the black jacket from the navy one. A shopper who can't use a mouse tabs into a newsletter popup and can't get back out. Someone with low vision can't read the light gray sale price on a white background. They usually don't write in; they leave, and the store carries on without them.

Then the demand letter

The one who does write in is a lawyer. I've watched clients pay $10,000 to $15,000 to make a demand letter go away. We fix the pages it lists, the case closes, and the store keeps changing.

Some of these suits are predatory, but they aren't pointless. For many owners, the letter is the first they've heard of accessibility. We're told to do the minimum, and then accessibility goes back to being an afterthought. It's still a bad investment.

Then come the overlays, toolbars that sit on top of the page and leave the code underneath unchanged. In 2025 the FTC ordered one of the biggest vendors to pay $1 million for wrongly claiming its overlay made sites compliant^*. In the first half of 2026, EcomBack counted 496 suits against sites that had one installed^*. Overlays are slow and ineffective. 72% of respondents with disabilities in WebAIM's 2021 practitioner survey rated them not very or not at all effective^*. Overlays are a cop-out.

What we built instead

Overlays are still what most stores reach for when a letter comes. I wanted something that works on the store itself, in the same theme code and catalog my team would edit by hand. That's SiteRemora.

It scans the storefront the way a shopper's browser sees it and traces each problem to where it starts, a line in the theme or a photo in the catalog. Theme problems get a code fix you can read before it goes live. Photos without descriptions get one drafted from the image, ready for your approval. Colors that fail contrast come with the closest shade that passes, and you pick.

Every change is saved with what it replaced, so any fix can be undone. And as the store changes, SiteRemora checks it again, so a fix you paid for once stays in place.

Make it easy to say yes

So here's where I've landed. Telling owners to care more won't move them, because they already care. What moves them is an investment small enough to say yes to, and one that keeps paying after they make it.

Software, ours included, still can't make a store pleasant to use with a screen reader. That part is still up to people, ideally people who use one every day. What software can do is take over the upkeep, so the time and money an owner does invest goes to the work only people can do.

Phillips asks why we tolerate this. From inside the Shopify world, my answer is that caring is the easy part. Paying for it every week, as new products, photos, pages and apps go live, is the hard part. The caring was always there. Now we need to take the friction out of acting on it.