We Audited 78 WooCommerce Stores. Here's What We Found
Before building EqualFix, we ran accessibility audits against 78 real WooCommerce stores across New York, California, and Florida — the three states with the most ADA filings. Sixteen got the full deep audit. Here's what the data actually looks like.
The headline numbers
- Average: ~34 accessibility findings per site. Not edge cases — the same issues, repeated across nearly every store.
- The worst offender: 125 findings on a single store.
- The most common issues were the same five everywhere: images without alt text, icon-only buttons and links with no accessible name, form fields with no associated label, missing page-language attributes, and absent skip links.
The patterns
Checkout flows are the danger zone. Unlabeled quantity selectors, icon-only remove-from-cart buttons, and checkout form fields with placeholder text instead of labels showed up constantly. This is the exact part of the site a lawsuit complaint quotes — it's where money changes hands, so it's where "denial of access" arguments land hardest.
Themes aren't the problem; neglect is. The issues weren't exotic theme bugs. They were the default output of popular themes and plugins that nobody ever checked. A stock WooCommerce install with a popular theme will fail an accessibility audit out of the box.
Nobody was monitoring. Every store we checked had accumulated issues over time — new products with unlabeled images, new plugins adding unnamed controls. Accessibility rots the same way security does: without continuous checking, it only gets worse.
What this means for your store
If you run WooCommerce and have never audited your site, you almost certainly have 20–40 of these issues right now. The good news: the most common ones are also the most mechanical to fix.
That's the bet EqualFix is built on. The free plugin scans your whole site, shows every finding with its severity and WCAG reference, and auto-fixes the safe ones — missing language attributes, decorative-image alt text, derived button and link names, form-field labels where the match is unambiguous, skip links. What it can't safely fix, it flags honestly for human review instead of pretending.
A note on the data
Sixteen stores got the complete audit; the rest were partially scanned before we stopped the sweep. The ~34-per-site average comes from the completed sixteen. We're not cherry-picking horror stories — this is what normal, functioning, revenue-generating stores look like under an accessibility scanner.
Want to know your number? Run the free scan — no sign-up needed.