Is WooCommerce accessible? What 2,284 real online shops actually reveal

I didn’t just ask myself whether WooCommerce shops are accessible. I measured it and scanned 2,284 real shops page by page. The results show that, in many cases, accessibility is a man-made problem.

The customers your shop will never see

Imagine someone with red-green colour blindness looking at your product image. To that person, the reduced price in red almost disappears into the grey background. Over 4 million people in Germany have some form of this colour vision deficiency. Among men, the figure is around 8 per cent – statistically, that’s roughly one in twelve (PRO RETINA).

Another customer is navigating your shop using a screen reader. When the term ‘shopping basket’ is mentioned, the person might only hear ‘button’ because the element does not have an accessible name.

The German Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (DBSV) estimates that around 650,000 people in Germany are blind or severely visually impaired. According to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), at least 118,000 people are officially registered as having a severe disability card. The DBSV estimates that the actual figure is significantly higher, as by no means every person with a visual impairment applies for such a card.

And then there’s the customer with a slightly shaky hand, who is shopping on their mobile and finds it difficult to tap a small ‘Add to basket’ button. In 38 per cent of WooCommerce shops, at least one target area was found that did not meet the minimum WCAG 2.2 requirement for target size. A total of 7.9 million people in Germany have a recognised severe disability (Destatis, as at the end of 2023). However, this figure only includes people with a degree of disability of at least 50 per cent and a valid severe disability card. Added to this are people with temporary impairments (e.g. a broken arm), impaired vision due to glaring sunlight, or those with little time to interact with the site.

The Act to Strengthen Accessibility (BFSG) has provided a legal framework for this issue since June 2025.

But I was interested in something else: not just what the law requires, but what the situation is actually like in real WooCommerce shops. How bad is it really?

How I assessed the accessibility of WooCommerce shops

I carried out automated testing on 8,713 Dutch online shops. 7,514 of these were reliably confirmed to be active online shops, and WooCommerce was identified as the platform used by 2,284 of them.

For each shop, I checked several page types:

• Home
• Category
• Product
• Shopping basket
• Checkout (where available)

I carried out the tests using axe-core. This is the same open-source testing engine used by Chrome DevTools and many accessibility plugins.

To put this into context: an automated scan covers only part of what the WCAG accessibility requirements entail. Criteria such as full keyboard accessibility or a logical reading order for screen readers cannot be tested entirely automatically. The results of an automated scan should therefore not be equated with a comprehensive accessibility audit. However, they do provide reproducible evidence of specific technical issues. In this study, more than two million elements were checked.

I make a distinction here between ‘serious’ and ‘critical’:

• ‘Serious’ means: some users will experience a noticeable hindrance, but will be able to achieve their goal with extra effort; for example, where colour contrast is too low.
• ‘Non-accessible’ means that a control is not accessible, or is only very difficult to access, for certain users. For example, a button without an accessible label may not be understandable to screen reader users, even though it is clearly visible.

The figures that even surprised me

Home and category pages

The tests produced the following results:

• 96.7 per cent of online shops have at least one colour contrast violation (WCAG 1.4.3). This makes it by far the most common type of error, accounting for more than 60 per cent of all errors found in the study.
• 76.4 per cent of online shops have at least one link without a recognisable name (WCAG 2.4.4 / 4.1.2). For screen reader users, this may, for example, appear as an incomprehensible link or as the repeated word ‘link’ without sufficient context.
• 38 per cent of online shops have at least one clickable area on their mobile sites that is smaller than the minimum size specified in WCAG 2.2, Success Criterion 2.5.8. This can make it difficult for people with impaired fine motor skills to use the site.
• 20.8 per cent of online shops have at least one product image without alternative text (WCAG 1.1.1). This is a serious issue because, for blind customers, a product photo simply does not exist if it has no alt text.
• 53.5 per cent of online shops have at least one critical barrier – for example, in a button, a form field or another interactive element.

An interesting side note: in this comparison, WooCommerce has the lowest proportion of shops with critical barriers (Shopify: 68.1 per cent, Magento: 78.7 per cent). However, this is no reason to rest on one’s laurels: with WooCommerce, the problem still affects more than one in two shops.

Product pages and shopping baskets

On the product page (n = 1,872 product pages examined) – precisely where the decision to buy is made – the situation is no better:

• 95.1 per cent of product pages have colour contrast errors
• 63.7 per cent of product pages contain incorrect link text
• 17.1 per cent of product pages have product images without alt text

Checkout

This got me thinking: out of 2,284 WooCommerce shops, the checkout page could be accessed anonymously in just 25 of them. For the remaining shops, the checkout was inaccessible without first creating an account, logging in or meeting other access requirements.

For the remaining 25 shops, the colour contrast error rate stood at 92 per cent. The sample size is too small to derive a reliable percentage for all shops. However, it illustrates how difficult it can be to test a checkout process automatically if this initially requires a session or a user account.

Why WooCommerce performs differently from Shopify or Magento

What caught our attention during the analysis was that WooCommerce shops perform noticeably better than Magento (53.5% vs. 78.7%) and slightly better than Shopify (68.1%) when it comes to critical barriers. When it comes to serious issues such as colour contrast violations, however, the figures are much closer together.

This is a hypothesis, not a proven causal link. One possible explanation is that WooCommerce is often built on established WordPress themes and components, which are based on reusable HTML templates for forms and buttons. Shopify shops, and Magento shops in particular, on the other hand, are more often created using bespoke setups, in which such basic patterns are implemented anew in each case.

However, this is consistent with a second finding: the median number of faulty elements per shop is actually higher for WooCommerce (77) than for Magento (72). WooCommerce shops are therefore not inherently ‘neater’ in their construction. They simply exhibit the specific types of errors classified as critical in this study less frequently.

The good news is: you don’t have to fix everything all at once

Now things are getting serious for WordPress professionals. We’ve worked out how many of the 7,514 online shops across all platforms would no longer have any serious or critical barriers if only the most common types of errors were rectified.

At present, only 1 per cent of all shops have no serious or critical accessibility issues. If you fix …

• … if we consider colour contrasts alone, the proportion rises to 5.4 per cent.
• … just link text and clickable area sizes account for 12.6 per cent.

Where critical barriers are concerned, simply adding alternative text, form labels and button captions is enough to ensure that 63.8 per cent of online shops no longer have any of the critical barriers considered in this assessment.

Three to five specific, technically manageable fixes can therefore close a surprisingly large part of the gap. This does not necessarily require a redesign or a new theme architecture. For an agency managing a WooCommerce shop, this means in practice:

• Incorporate a contrast check: Tools such as the contrast ratio feature built into Chrome DevTools or a plugin like WP Accessibility help you check WooCommerce’s own theme colour scheme before the shop goes live. It’s particularly worth checking sale badges and buttons, as these are often designed in solid red on a light background.
• Measuring click areas: 24 × 24 CSS pixels is a minimum requirement under WCAG 2.2, not the ideal target for every interaction. Furthermore, there are exceptions, such as when there is sufficient spacing from other targets. A shopping basket icon that is barely larger than the mouse pointer is hardly noticeable on a desktop and can be difficult to use on a smartphone.
• Making link text descriptive: ‘Find out more’ or a simple icon without an accessible name can cause problems for axe-core and screen readers. An accessible name that includes, for example, the product name makes the function much clearer for screen reader users.
• Make alternative text a mandatory part of the editorial process: WooCommerce does not automatically prompt for meaningful alternative text during product uploads in every setup. The editorial team should check this using a fixed checklist before each publication.
• Always link form fields to a genuine label element: particularly with customised checkout fields such as company name, VAT number or delivery instructions, the label is often simply positioned visually without being linked to the input field via code.

Raidboxes’ comprehensive WordPress Accessibility Guide goes into greater depth on the technical implementation. The figures above show why these particular points are worth tackling first.

Conclusion: The target audience is larger than you think

At first glance, the group of people who benefit from accessibility sounds like a small, specialised target group. Screen readers, Braille – just a niche topic? The figures tell a different story:

• 4 million people have colour vision deficiency
• At least 650,000 people are blind or severely visually impaired.
• 7.9 million people have a recognised severe disability

Added to this are all those who want to shop online whilst their hands are shaking, they have a broken arm, or they’re simply using their mobile phone in the blazing sun – and for whom small controls can make it difficult to use the site.

The figures show that accessibility is not a niche issue. However, it is not possible to deduce directly from these population figures what proportion of a shop’s own customer base this represents. One thing is clear, though: most WooCommerce shops lose potential users not at a single point, but at several – for example, in terms of colour contrast, link text, alternative text and user controls.

The findings from the test results of 2,284 online shops are not intended as a threat, but rather as a guide to prioritising: you do not need to address every WCAG rule at once to make a noticeable difference. A few clearly identifiable, technically manageable fixes can already reduce a large proportion of the problems identified in this study.

Methodology note: All figures are taken from our own automated survey (axe-core 4.13, September 2026) of 7,514 verified Dutch online shops, of which 2,284 were identified as running on WooCommerce. Full methodology and raw data: cluesia.com/de/research/dutch-webshop-accessibility-2026