Magento Accessibility: Creating Stores Everyone Can Use

Here’s a sobering fact: the average Magento homepage contains around 85 accessibility errors.

That’s 85 barriers between you and potential customers.

If you’re running an Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) or the Magento Open Source store, you’re probably here for one of three reasons. Perhaps Legal just forwarded you a stern email about ADA compliance. Maybe you’re staring at 100,000 product images that need alt text by Monday. Or you’re building a new store and wondering how to avoid creating an accessibility nightmare from day one.

Good news: you’re not alone, and there’s a clear path forward.

As proud accessibility nerds, today we’ll show you exactly what works (and what doesn’t) for making Magento stores usable by everyone – including the 1 billion people worldwide with disabilities who represent $13 trillion in purchasing power.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn’t explicitly mention websites. Yet courts have increasingly ruled that eCommerce sites are “places of public accommodation” – meaning your Magento store must be usable by people with disabilities.

But what does “usable” actually mean?

Enter the POUR principles – your accessibility foundation:

WCAG offers three conformance levels: A (basic), AA (recommended), and AAA (specialised). For Magento stores, Level AA is your target – it’s what courts expect and what avoids most legal issues. This includes meeting 50 specific criteria across all four POUR principles. 

It might sound overwhelming, but it’s a price worth paying, unless you don’t care about accessibility or becoming part of the ever-growing statistic of ADA lawsuits against eCommerce sites. 

And here’s the thing: audits and fixes are always cheaper than litigation.

Professional accessibility audits typically cost €5,000-$25,000 and take 2-4 weeks. That might sound steep, but it’s a fraction of legal defence costs. Services like The A11Y Collective’s audit provide both a documented evaluation and a clear remediation roadmap.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: there’s no magic extension that transforms your Magento store into an accessibility wonderland overnight. No preset theme, no one-click plugin, no automated solution that genuinely makes your website fully accessible.

The truth? You’re in the driver’s seat.

Since store owners bear full responsibility for WCAG compliance, those tempting overlay widgets that promise instant fixes? They typically achieve just 30% effectiveness – hardly the comprehensive solution your customers deserve. And while Adobe does provide some basic accessibility guidelines, they don’t go into too much detail. 

So, how do you actually implement WCAG in Magento? Start with these foundational elements:

Your product pages need simple, clear content with legible fonts (no over-stylised scripts that readers struggle with). Every single product image requires descriptive alt text – yes, even that twentieth angle of the same shoe. Got product videos? They’ll need captions and audio descriptions too.

But here’s where it gets technical: you’ll need semantic HTML throughout. That means using proper heading structures (h1, h2, h3) instead of just making text bigger, and ensuring your code tells assistive technologies exactly what each element does.

Try shopping in your store using only the Tab key. Can you:

If you answered “not sure” to any of these, you’ve got work ahead.

Here’s where accessibility often falls apart. Your checkout needs properly labelled form fields (not just placeholder text!), plus clear error messages that explicitly link to the problematic field. When someone’s credit card gets declined, “Error” isn’t helpful – “Card number invalid: please check digits” is.

Those gorgeous brand colours? They need a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text, 3:1 for large text. 

Besides that, you need to remember that you can’t rely on colour alone to convey information. That red error text needs an icon or “Error:” label too, otherwise customers who are colour-blind won’t spot the problem. And text must remain usable when zoomed to 200% or the entire page to 400%.

Want to dive deeper? The A11Y Collective’s Accessible Code course teaches developers these principles hands-on – because understanding the ‘why’ makes the ‘how’ much clearer.

Let’s take a look at a real-world scenario of what trying to be compliant sometimes looks like. One Reddit user shares the following: “I have roughly 100,000 images that need alt text.” 

Obviously, that wouldn’t be a problem if they added the alt text with every single image, but this is a perfect example of someone trying to make a store accessible after already operating for a while. 

Here’s how one might tackle this realistically:

Tools like AltText.ai’s Alt Text Generator can handle the heavy lifting – they even have specialised eCommerce models that blend product names intelligently. 

💡 Quick win for stores with good product descriptions:

Already have detailed product text with features, measurements, and materials? You can mark product images as decorative (alt=””) instead of writing 100,000 descriptions. Screen reader users get all the info from your text, and you avoid terrible AI-generated alt text.

Trade-off: This might reduce your presence in Google Images searches, but for accessibility compliance, it’s perfectly valid.

But here’s the real insight: Quick fixes might solve the current crisis, but for rock-solid prevention, you need to learn and implement proper alt text principles from the start.

This is why it’s so important for everyone to understand accessible content writing principles. Once your team knows how to write effective alt text (hint: it’s not just “product photo”), you stop accumulating this technical debt.

The A11Y Collective’s tutorials specifically teach these principles for eCommerce teams – because fixing 100,000 images is painful, but creating 100,000 more bad ones is worse.

Accessibility is a constant practice, and like security updates or performance monitoring, it needs to become part of your work rhythm.

Start with reality. Test your current store using:

Document every issue you find. Yes, it’ll be depressing. That’s normal.

Remember those core issues we discussed? Alt text, keyboard navigation, form labels, contrast ratios?

Start there. Not with fancy features – with the basics that affect every page.

Here’s where most stores fail: they fix things once, then break them again with the next update.

The solution? Train your entire team.

When designers understand contrast requirements, developers know ARIA patterns, and content editors write proper alt text, accessibility maintains itself. Business training packages that cover all roles aren’t an expense – they’re insurance against regression.

Think quarterly rhythm, not annual panic:

Keep records of:

The bottom line: Treat accessibility like you treat SSL certificates or GDPR compliance. Not because you have to (though you do), but because it’s simply how modern stores operate.

When accessibility becomes as routine as checking your conversion rates, you’ve won.

Your situation determines your starting point:

The pattern is clear: Overlays don’t work, and quick fixes create debt. But when your entire team understands accessibility principles – through proper training – every sprint naturally produces compliant code.

That’s the difference between scrambling for compliance and systematically building it.

Ready to stop the accessibility panic cycle? Turn your team into accessibility experts with The A11Y Collective’s foundational team training!