Why detection is only half the job: the case for automated remediation on Shopify

You ran Lighthouse on your Shopify store. Now what?

You’ve heard that your Shopify store needs to be accessible. Maybe a competitor got sued. Maybe the European Accessibility Act got your attention. So you do the responsible thing: you run a Lighthouse audit or install an accessibility checker app from the Shopify App Store.

The report comes back: 47 violations on your product page alone. Missing alt text on 12 images. Six color contrast failures. Four unlabeled buttons. Two keyboard traps. A missing language attribute. No skip navigation link.

You are now where most Shopify merchants get stuck. You know what’s wrong. You have no idea how to fix it. The report references WCAG success criteria that are new to you, points to HTML elements you can’t locate in your theme, and assumes a level of front-end development knowledge that most store owners don’t have.

Detection tells you what’s wrong. It doesn’t tell you how to fix it.

image-alt · WCAG 1.1.1
Element has no alt attribute
> Fix any of the following:
  Element has no alt attribute

−Removed: <img src="{{ img }}">+Added: <img src="{{ img }}"+Added:   alt="Walnut leather sneaker,+Added:        side view">

The problem with detection-only tools

Tools like WAVE, Lighthouse, and axe-core are excellent at identifying accessibility violations. They’ll scan your pages and produce a report: “Element has insufficient color contrast (WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.3),” “Form input missing associated label,” “Link element has no discernible text.”

For a developer, these reports are actionable. For a Shopify merchant managing their store? They’re effectively a foreign language.

The typical workflow looks something like this:

1. Run an accessibility scan on your Shopify store
2. Receive a report listing dozens (or hundreds) of violations
3. Try to understand what each violation means
4. Figure out where in your Liquid theme files the problem lives
5. Research how to fix it without breaking your design or your theme’s section architecture
6. Make the change, test across pages, and hope it doesn’t break when you update the theme

Most Shopify merchants stall at step 3. The ones who push through often spend weeks, and significant budget, hiring Shopify developers to work through the list item by item. And the list grows again the next time they install an app or update their theme.

Why overlays fall short

Faced with this gap, many Shopify merchants turn to accessibility overlay apps in the Shopify App Store, JavaScript widgets that sit on top of your site and patch issues on the fly. These overlays promise one-click WCAG compliance.

The accessibility community has been vocal about why overlays fall short. They don’t modify the underlying Liquid templates or HTML. They often introduce new accessibility issues. They can conflict with assistive technologies that users already rely on. And they provide a false sense of compliance while leaving your codebase as it was.

The FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1 million for misleading compliance claims.^* Courts have declined to let an overlay moot an ADA claim.^* In 2025, a quarter of ADA website lawsuits hit sites that already had an overlay installed.^*

Overlays are a band-aid on a wound that needs stitches.

A different approach: automated remediation

SiteRemora takes a different approach. We read your Shopify theme code and fix it.

Here’s how it works:

1. Scan: We connect to your Shopify store and scan every page that matters: product pages, collection pages, the cart, search results, blog posts, and your homepage. We use industry-standard scanning (the same technology trusted by accessibility professionals) to identify every violation.

2. Analyze: For each violation found, our engine locates the exact line of code in your Shopify theme responsible. Not a vague pointer to “somewhere on this page,” but the precise Liquid template, HTML block, or CSS rule causing the issue. If a violation comes from an app-injected element, we identify that too.

3. Fix: We generate a targeted code change that resolves the violation while preserving your design. These aren’t generic patches. Each fix is tailored to your specific Shopify theme and context. When a product image needs alt text, we use AI to understand what the product looks like and generate a description that matches what a sighted shopper would see. When a button needs an accessible label, we analyze the surrounding UI to produce something that makes sense to a screen reader user.

What we fix

SiteRemora ships with specialized fixers that cover the most common, and most costly, accessibility violations found in Shopify stores, the same items as the checklist:

• Color Contrast: Suggests the nearest shade of your own text color that meets the WCAG AA ratio, lets you keep it or pick another, and writes the color you choose into your theme’s CSS. Catches the contrast failures that Shopify’s theme editor doesn’t warn you about.
• Empty Buttons: Adds meaningful aria-labels to icon-only buttons in your Liquid templates: cart icons, search icons, close buttons, hamburger menus, and app-injected icon buttons.
• Empty Links: Labels links that contain only images or icons with no text alternative, including social media icon links and image-wrapped product links.
• Form Labels: Associates visible labels with form inputs so screen readers can announce what each field is for. Covers newsletter signup forms, contact forms, and search inputs.
• Heading Hierarchy: Corrects skipped heading levels to create a logical document outline. Shopify’s section-based architecture makes it easy to accidentally skip from h1 to h4 when sections render in unexpected orders.
• Missing Language: Adds the lang attribute to your HTML so assistive technologies know what language to use. A one-line fix that many Shopify themes still miss.
• Landmarks: Wraps content in semantic HTML regions (main, nav, footer) so users can navigate by page structure. Ensures your Shopify theme’s layout.liquid file has proper landmark regions.
• Skip Navigation: Inserts a skip-to-main-content link so keyboard users can bypass your store’s repetitive header navigation on every page.

Each fix produces a clear before-and-after diff that you can review before it’s applied.

You’re in control

We know that making changes to a live Shopify theme can feel risky. That’s why every store starts in Manual, and Deep Sea adds two autopilot modes you can switch on:

• Manual: Every fix is queued for your review. You approve or reject each one individually.
• Smart: High-confidence, low-risk fixes (like adding a missing lang attribute or inserting a skip-nav link) are applied after each automatic scan. Everything else waits for your review.
• Full: Smart’s fixes, plus corrected heading levels, are applied after each automatic scan. Labels for buttons, links and form fields, AI-drafted patches and alt text still wait for your review.

Every fix is logged in a full audit trail. If something doesn’t look right, you can revert any individual fix with one click. Your original theme code is always preserved.

Fixes in the theme itself

The difference is this: SiteRemora modifies your Shopify theme files. When we fix a color contrast issue, the CSS in your theme reflects the change. When we add an aria-label to a button, it’s in the Liquid template. These are permanent improvements to your store’s accessibility, made in the files themselves, so they hold whether or not a script loads.

When you update your Shopify theme or install a new app, we re-scan and catch any new violations that were introduced; drift is the reason that matters. Accessibility isn’t a one-time project. On Shopify, where themes update and apps change constantly, it’s an ongoing process, and SiteRemora handles it automatically.

Your store becomes more accessible in the code, where it counts.

Where to start

SiteRemora is on the Shopify App Store. The free plan scans up to 150 pages, shows every issue in plain language and includes five AI fixes to try; the paid plans write every fix into the theme and the catalog, keep checking and keep the record.

We built the tool we wished existed, one that finds accessibility problems and fixes them.