Shopify’s Prestige theme, run through thirteen accessibility checks.
We ran the same thirteen checks we run for clients on the Prestige demo store. It passed nine. Here is every line with the count behind it, what the four failures were, and which ones are the theme’s job and which one is yours.
What we ran, and where
We ran the checks on the Prestige demo store listed on the Shopify Theme Store, prestige-theme-allure.myshopify.com, on September 7, 2026. Three pages: the home page, the Sale collection page, and the product page for Le Nouveau Cartable Navy, opened in a real browser at desktop width, with the product page opened again at phone width. The whole run took 16 seconds. The counts below are what the browser found on those pages that day.
This is the same check that runs on the free Storefront Check. Nothing here is a compliance claim or a certificate. It is thirteen things, counted.
Every line of the result
| Check | Measured | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Every photo has a description | 129 images | Fail |
| Buttons say what they do | 87 buttons | Pass |
| Form fields say what to type | 6 fields | Pass |
| The page says what language it is in | 3 pages | Pass |
| Keyboard users can skip the menu | 3 pages | Pass |
| Phones can pinch to zoom | 3 pages | Pass |
| Screen readers can jump between sections | 3 pages | Pass |
| Tab order follows the page | 3 pages | Pass |
| Each page has a real title | 3 pages | Pass |
| Links say where they go | 168 links | Pass |
| Buttons are big enough to tap | 263 controls | Fail |
| Text is readable against its background | 314 samples | Fail |
| An accessibility statement is linked | site-wide | Fail |
Nine of thirteen passed. The four failures were small in number: 4 images of 129 with no description, 19 controls of 263 too small to tap, and 12 text samples of 314 below the ratio. No line ended undecided. Seventy-three more text spots sit over photos or gradients, where a machine cannot measure contrast at all; those are held for a person to look at.
What Prestige gets right
All 87 buttons on those three pages have a name a screen reader can read. All 168 links say where they go. All 6 form fields have a label. The skip link works. The landmarks are there, the tab order is left alone, pinch to zoom is not switched off, and every page has a real title.
That matters more than the score. The failures that demand letters name most often are unnamed links, unnamed buttons and unlabelled fields, and this theme ships without any of them. Even the carousel dots, which are the smallest controls on the page, carry proper names: each one reads “Go to item 1”, “Go to item 2”, and so on.
The three things the theme gets wrong
We opened the same three pages ourselves to see what was behind the counts.
- The sale price is too faint. On the product page the sale price is printed in red
#e32c2bon the store’s#efefefbackground at about 17.8 pixels. That measures 3.91 to 1. Text that size needs 4.5 to 1. It is the price of the thing you are selling, and it is the one that misses. - The carousel dots are 6 pixels. Every page-dot control we measured is 6 pixels by 6 pixels. WCAG 2.2 AA asks for 24. On the phone-width run of the product page, all ten tap-size failures were these dots and nothing else. They are named correctly and they are almost impossible to hit.
- Video poster images have no description. Where the theme renders a video, it puts a still image inside the video element with no
altattribute at all. We saw one on each of the three pages. That is theme markup, not something anyone uploaded.
Our adviceFix the dots first, because it is one rule and it covers every carousel in the theme. Give .tap-area a minimum width and height of 24 pixels, or wrap the 6-pixel dot in a 24-pixel padded button so the dot still looks like a dot. The design does not have to change; only the thing your thumb has to find.
Our adviceFor the sale price, do not reach for a darker red at random. Take the theme’s on-sale colour down until it measures 4.5 to 1 against your page background and check it against the page you actually sell on, because the background changes with the colour scheme you picked.
What we saw while the page was still loading
One finding is worth naming because it is easy to miss. Prestige can lay the header over a hero image, and while that image is still arriving the header renders its white text over the plain page background. For those seconds the nav reads white on light grey, which measures 1.14 to 1. Once the image lands, the same text is dark on white and it is fine.
A machine that looks during loading counts that as a failure. So does a shopper on a slow connection in a car park. It is not a reason to panic, and it is a reason to give the header a solid background until the image is painted.
The one thing no theme can do for you
The demo store has no accessibility statement, and no theme ships one. A statement is a page that says how the store is tested, what is known to be broken, and how someone tells you they are stuck. It is the cheapest item on this list and the one that most often turns a letter into an email.
Our adviceWrite the statement after the audit, not before. A statement that promises more than the store does is worse than no statement. Ours is at junand.co/accessibility if you want the shape of one.
What this does not tell you about your store
A demo store is a showroom. It has 129 images; a real jewelry store has hundreds. It has 168 links; the last live store we counted had 1,125. It has seven products in its sale collection, no apps, no size charts, no metal swatches, and nobody has been adding sections to it for three years.
Almost everything that fails on a live Prestige store was added after the theme was installed. Product photos uploaded without a description. An app that draws a pop-up with no label. A custom section with white text over a photo. A colour swatch that announces itself as “link”.
Why the theme’s score is not your score. Nine of thirteen on the demo store says the floor is decent and names three things to fix in the theme. It says nothing about the ceiling. The only number that means anything for your store is the one counted on your store.
If you run Prestige, check these four things first
- Your sale prices. If you use the theme’s on-sale colour, every discounted product page carries the same faint price. It is one CSS value.
- Every carousel on the store. The dots are 6 pixels wherever they appear: hero, testimonials, product images, related products.
- Your product photos. Prestige does not write alt text. Every image you uploaded needs a description of what is in it.
- Text you laid over a photo. Seventy-three spots on the demo store already sit over images, and a machine cannot measure those. On your store there will be more.
All four take about a minute to check. Paste your address into the free check and it counts them for you.
Next
Impulse is the other theme in this round, run the same way, on the same three page types. Symmetry, Sense and Craft follow. We publish the whole result each time, including the checks a theme passes.