Straight answers about the European Accessibility Act and about what this app does and does not do.
It applies to businesses selling to consumers in the EU, and it has been enforceable since 28 June 2025. Where your business is registered does not matter; where your customers are does.
There is an exemption for micro-enterprises. The directive defines one as a business employing fewer than 10 people and whose annual turnover or annual balance sheet total does not exceed €2 million. The financial part is either measure, not both, so a business over €2M in turnover can still qualify if its balance sheet total is under it.
If you are near any of those thresholds, confirm your position with an accountant or a lawyer rather than with us.
Enforcement is set by each member state rather than centrally, so penalties vary. Germany’s implementing law provides for fines up to €100,000 in the most serious cases. Several member states treat a missing accessibility statement as an infringement in its own right.
What we have not been able to establish is any published enforcement action against a small online store since the Act became enforceable. Figures circulating in vendor marketing, including specific fines for missing alt text, do not trace to any decision we could find. Treat them, and this paragraph, as uncertain.
Separately from any fine, a customer who cannot complete a purchase is a customer who does not buy from you.
Service providers are expected to publish information on how their service meets the accessibility requirements. Several member states treat a missing statement as a distinct infringement, which makes it one of the cheapest things on the list to put right. Perceivable generates a draft from your audit results for you to review and publish.
Overlay widgets add JavaScript that modifies the page after it loads. Screen readers work from the underlying document, so much of what the overlay changes never reaches the person it is meant to help. Courts have repeatedly declined to accept overlays as evidence of conformance, and in 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission fined one vendor $1M over its compliance claims.
Perceivable adds nothing to your storefront. It reads your theme and your store data and reports what it finds.
Two reasons. Shopify withdrew the ability for public apps to write theme files in 2023, so no app can edit your theme without a specific exemption. More importantly, automatic fixes are what overlays promise, and the reason they fail: accessibility problems live in markup and design decisions that need judgement.
What the app gives you instead is where the fault originates, the exact elements involved, and what the criterion requires in order to pass. A developer can act on that in minutes.
It is a single number from 0 to 100 summarising how much accessibility risk the audit found. It weighs three things: how severe each issue is, how central the affected area is to actually buying something, and how many instances exist.
A broken variant picker on a product page therefore scores far higher than the same fault in a footer. It is an indicator for prioritising work, not a compliance grade.
Because that is true, and pretending otherwise is exactly what got an overlay vendor fined. Automated testing reliably detects roughly a third of WCAG 2.1 level AA success criteria. Whether alt text is meaningful, whether reading order makes sense, whether a form's errors can be understood and corrected: these need a person.
The generated documents reflect this. There is no output that says "fully conformant", and the conformance status cannot be edited upward.
Reading your theme source and store data does not reveal:
Every report lists these exclusions, so a score is never mistaken for a complete picture.
Auditing is free and unlimited. You keep the risk index, the severity breakdown, and the full list of what is broken, including how many instances and which areas are affected.
The subscription is $29 per month, or $290 a year, after a 7-day trial on either. It unlocks what each issue requires in order to pass, where in the theme it originates, the specific elements involved, unlimited re-audits, and the accessibility statement and evidence report.
Read-only access to three things: your theme files, your product records including image alt text, and your published pages and blog posts.
It holds no permission to read customers, orders, or payment data, so it cannot access them even in principle. Details are in the privacy policy.
In Shopify admin, open a product, click an image in the Media section, and edit its alt text. Describe what the image shows rather than what it is: "Navy wool overcoat, front view" rather than "coat photo".
Shopify fills this in from the uploaded filename by default, which is why so many stores have hundreds of images announcing things like "IMG_4180.jpg". Images that are purely decorative should have their alt text left empty on purpose.
At any time, from your Shopify admin. Cancelling stops future charges. Uninstalling the app deletes your audit history and stored details entirely.
Not answered here?
Email paolok5@hotmail.com and you will get a reply from the person who built the app, usually within a couple of days.
Questions about whether the law applies to your specific business should go to a qualified professional. We can tell you what your store does. We cannot advise you on your legal position.