Making your Shopify or e-commerce store look great is important, but you need the right tools and themes to do it. While themes can save you money on developers, not all of them are created equal—especially when it comes to ADA compliance. We've seen businesses get sued for non-compliance, and unfortunately, many popular themes on sites like ThemeForest don't meet the necessary standards.

Before you pick a new Shopify theme from ThemeForest, let me explain why you might want to think twice.

What Is ThemeForest?

ThemeForest is essentially a marketplace for templates anyone can use for websites or eCommerce shops. For the millions of people who run websites but don’t feel like making them from scratch, they offer some fairly nifty and impressive templates or “themes” that you can use to spruce up your shop. That extends to other kinds of websites too.

Whether you’re selling, writing, marketing, or educating with your website there’s probably an available theme that offers various improvements, be they visual or functional. For people who don’t have the time and money to hire developers to work from scratch, it’s undoubtedly appealing, until you dig deeper into its issues with ADA compliance.

The Importance of ADA Compliance

Accessibility isn’t just a suggestion, it’s the law. I’ve already written about the large number of nuisance lawsuits based on ADA compliance. In many of those cases, people acting in bad faith sue small businesses that aren’t completely compliant with the regulations. Not every situation is the same though.

For every nuisance lawsuit where someone’s trying to squeeze a dime out of a small business, there’s an instance where a business is not as accessible as it should be. That now extends to websites. Even basic business pages need to adhere to the many regulations that now exist. It’s not just the law, it’s a way to make your business more accessible to more customers. That’s the goal already, isn’t it?

The more accessible your page is the more users will be able to access it. It’s a win-win for everyone, except for some ThemeForest themes.

Why ThemeForest Themes Are Not Compliant

Many of the themes of ThemeForest claim that they’re ADA-compliant, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for a large number of them.

We grabbed a few of their themes and put them to the test. The results came in and they were not good, to say the least. Here are just a few of the ways those ThemeForest themes came up short:

  • Not Keyboard Navigatable
  • Incorrect HTML Usage
  • Incorrect Screenreader Announcements
  • No Focus Indicator

While those weren’t the only issues we found, they were the most frequent. This might have been excusable 10 years ago, but so many companies are putting accessibility at the forefront. It’s not just about following the law, it’s about appealing to the most customers and making that your mission. When you choose a theme for your Shopify store that doesn’t do that your users and customers are going to notice.

Only Almost ADA-Compliant Shopify Theme

The truth is that we didn’t find a lot of themes that fully adhered to ADA regulations. It’s become abundantly clear that many of these creators don’t value ADA compliance. The only alternative we found that was anywhere near compliant was the free Dawn theme by Shopify. Based on the ratings though, it has a whole set of issues to be worried about.

Ultimately, it’s on you to make sure that the theme you choose is fully compliant. Thankfully, the best options will make that information readily available. All you need to do is look! Most themes will include their documentation on their features or benefits list and some might include it in the footer of their personal webpage. Still, the only way to guarantee the themes you’ll see are ADA-compliant is to do the research.

Don’t settle for a visually impressive theme that doesn’t make ADA compliance a priority, because many of your customers won’t settle for it either.