Guides
Shopify accessibility for fitness and athletic stores.
Defensible WCAG 2.2 AA documentation for fitness and athletic Shopify storefronts. Choose your state for location-specific guidance.
Fitness and athletic storefronts are rich with media: workout demo videos, before-and-after transformation galleries, and interactive program-selector widgets. Those elements are also where WCAG failures cluster. A shopper who is Deaf cannot follow a captionless exercise video. One who navigates by keyboard cannot reach a plan tier if the selector is built as an unsemantic grid of styled divs. The UI looks high-energy on screen and falls completely flat for assistive technology.
Paperfort runs an automated axe-core scan against your live storefront, covering product pages, collection pages, and key landing pages, and produces three documents: a timestamped WCAG 2.2 AA audit report with a prioritized remediation list, a completed VPAT 2.5Rev, and a hosted accessibility statement for your domain. Automated scans detect only a portion of WCAG issues (roughly a third to half by industry estimates), so the report also identifies where manual review is still required.
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Common WCAG 2.2 AA failures in Fitness & Athletic Shopify stores
Workout demo videos without captions or a pause control
WCAG 1.2.2, 2.2.2Embedded product videos showing exercise form or program previews frequently ship without synchronized captions, failing WCAG 1.2.2 (Captions, Prerecorded). When those videos auto-play as background hero loops, the absence of a visible pause or stop control also violates WCAG 2.2.2 (Pause, Stop, Hide), which applies to any moving content that starts automatically and lasts more than five seconds.
Subscription plan and program tier selectors built without labels
WCAG 1.3.1, 4.1.2Plan-picker widgets, whether styled radio groups or card grids with JavaScript click handlers, routinely omit fieldset and legend markup or aria-label attributes. Without them, a screen reader user hears only "button" or "radio button" with no indication of which tier (monthly, annual, six-week challenge) is being selected, failing WCAG 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value) and the programmatic structure requirement of 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships).
Before-and-after transformation images with empty or absent alt text
WCAG 1.1.1Side-by-side transformation photos are content-bearing images that communicate results central to the product claim. When they carry alt="" or no alt attribute at all, a screen reader user receives nothing. WCAG 1.1.1 (Non-text Content) requires a text alternative that conveys the same information the image conveys, such as a brief description of what the before and after states show.
Weight, rep, or nutrition data tables missing column headers
WCAG 1.3.1Comparison tables for meal plans, supplement dosing charts, and progressive overload schedules are often coded as plain <div> grids or as <table> elements stripped of <th scope="col"> header cells. WCAG 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships) requires that the relationships expressed visually through layout be available programmatically, so assistive technology can identify which column a data cell belongs to.
Fitness & Athletic accessibility: common questions
- Our hero video is muted and decorative. Does it still need a pause button?
- If the video auto-plays, lasts more than five seconds, and moves (even silently), WCAG 2.2.2 (Pause, Stop, Hide) applies. A muted state addresses audio but not the motion. A keyboard-accessible pause or stop control is still required. The narrow exception is when the animation is essential to the content, which a looping lifestyle clip is unlikely to qualify as.
- We use a third-party program selector app. Are we responsible for its accessibility failures?
- Yes. WCAG conformance applies to the full page as the shopper experiences it, regardless of which vendor injected a component. Third-party apps surfaced on your storefront pages are in scope for an audit. The report will identify the element and the criterion it fails; remediation may involve contacting the app developer or replacing the component.
- Our product descriptions include calorie counts and macro breakdowns as tables. Do those need headers too?
- Yes. Any data table where the meaning of a cell depends on its row or column position needs properly marked-up headers under WCAG 1.3.1. A
<th scope="col">on each column header (Protein, Carbs, Fat, Calories) lets a screen reader announce both the value and its label. Flat lists of values without that structure are not machine-readable.
Other industries
Paperfort produces defensible WCAG 2.2 AA documentation — an audit report, a hosted accessibility statement page, and a VPAT 2.5. It is documentation, not an overlay widget, and it is not legal advice.