Reviewed October 18, 2026

Planning a Shopify accessibility audit: cost, timeline, and scope

What an accessibility audit actually involves, what drives its price, how long remediation takes, and how to scope one so the report turns into fixes instead of a binder.

What you are actually buying

An accessibility audit is expert testing of your store against recognized guidelines, using assistive technologies, producing findings located by page and template with severity and remediation guidance. It is not a scanner report. Automated tools catch a minority of issues and cannot judge focus order, screen reader experience, or whether alt text says anything useful.

The deliverable to ask for is a prioritized fix list your developers can execute, with template level findings separated from one off content problems. One template fix can clear the same barrier from thousands of pages, and a report that buries that fact under page by page listings wastes its own insight.

What drives the cost

Scope: number of templates and distinct flows tested, with product, collection, cart, checkout adjacent steps, account, and search being the commerce core. Store size matters less than template count, since pages sharing a template share its barriers. Custom themes and heavy app usage add testing surface and raise effort.

Expect real audits of real stores to cost in the thousands, not the hundreds, and be suspicious of instant, cheap, guaranteed compliant offers. The economics of expert manual testing do not bend that far. Ask what share of the work is manual and which assistive technologies are used; the answers separate audits from printouts.

A realistic timeline

Testing itself typically runs two to four weeks for a scoped storefront, with the report and a walkthrough at the end. Remediation is the longer act: template fixes in a focused sprint of a few weeks for most stores, then verification retesting of the fixed templates, then content level cleanup as ongoing work.

Plan the sequence so audit delivery lands when developer time is actually available. A report that waits three months for attention describes a store that has since changed, and the team ends up re testing instead of fixing. The audit calendar and the development calendar are one decision, not two.

Turning findings into shipped fixes

Prioritize by barrier severity and template reach: blockers on the purchase path first, then widespread template issues, then content level items in traffic order. Assign each finding an owner and a fix or a documented workaround with a date, and retest fixes with the same assistive technology that found the problem.

Keep the audit, the fix log, and the retest results together as your record. That file is what demonstrates a working program to partners, enterprise buyers, and anyone asking hard questions later. The audit's value compounds when it becomes a system; as a binder, it depreciates to zero.

Frequently asked questions

Can I just run a free scanner instead of an audit?

Run one, by all means; it will find real issues like missing alt text and some contrast failures. But scanners detect only a fraction of barriers and none of the experiential ones, like keyboard traps or meaningless link text. A clean scan is a starting point, not evidence of accessibility, and should never be described as an audit.

How many pages should an audit test?

Templates and flows, not raw page counts: typically the homepage, a collection, several product variants, search results, cart, account flows, and key content pages, plus the checkout related steps your platform exposes. Fifteen to twenty five representative screens usually cover a store's real barrier surface when chosen well.

Should the audit include our checkout?

Include everything you control around checkout and be clear about which parts the platform owns. Your theme, apps, and pre checkout steps are yours; hosted checkout fields may be the platform's responsibility, but shoppers experience them as your store, so findings there still belong in your record and your vendor conversations.

How often should a store repeat its audit?

After major redesigns or theme changes, and otherwise on a one to two year cycle, with lighter internal testing quarterly. Accessibility decays as stores change; apps, content, and theme updates introduce new barriers continuously. The repeat audit measures whether your process, not just your store, is working.