Does an accessibility-ready WordPress theme make my store compliant?

No. The accessibility-ready tag means the theme's defaults passed a review; your colors, your page builder sections, your plugins, and your content all modify what shipped. The store must be checked as configured, not as the theme was sold.

Is WooCommerce itself accessible?

Core WooCommerce templates are workable and improving, but almost no store runs them bare: themes, page builders, and checkout plugins override them, and that is where audits find the failures.

Which pages of a WooCommerce store should be checked first?

The purchase path: home, shop archive, a product page, cart, and checkout, plus contact. Template-level fixes there repeat across the whole catalog.

Guide

WooCommerce accessibility check: what to test in a WordPress store

A WooCommerce store is WordPress plus a theme plus whatever plugins accumulated over the years, and accessibility lives and dies in that stack. Core WooCommerce is the smallest part of the answer; your theme, your page builder, and your busiest plugins decide whether a screen reader user can buy from you. Here is how to check it honestly.

Where the failures actually live

The theme and page builder. Contrast baked into the palette, heading levels chosen for looks (a page of h4s because they were the right size), focus outlines removed for style, and builder sections that read in a different order than they display. Page-builder stores are where visual order and DOM order drift furthest apart.
Plugins that inject UI. Popup and newsletter plugins without keyboard dismissal, sliders that auto-advance, cookie banners that trap focus, review widgets with unlabeled stars, checkout field plugins that replace labeled fields with placeholder-only ones.
The media library. Bulk-uploaded product images with empty alt text, or alt text that is the filename. WordPress makes alt text editable in the library, which also makes this the cheapest big fix in the whole stack.
Core WooCommerce templates are rarely the offender, and when they are, it is usually because a theme overrode them.

The accessibility-ready tag, read correctly

WordPress.org's "accessibility-ready" theme tag means the theme's defaults passed a real review, and it is worth preferring. It is not a compliance claim about your site: the review saw neither your color choices, nor your builder layouts, nor a single one of your plugins. The same reading applies to any "WCAG compliant theme" marketing. Check the store as configured; the standard it is checked against is the same WCAG 2.1 AA everywhere.

How to run the check

Free, one minute: your busiest product page through the free instant check: the machine-checkable layer, honestly labeled.
The whole store, $149: the automated audit covers every page with evidence and fix instructions your developer can apply in the theme and plugin settings, in 24 hours.
When someone else will read the result: the signed audit ($490, 48-72 hours), reviewed and signed by an IAAP-certified specialist: the version for procurement, an EU authority under the EAA, or your attorney.

Already holding a demand letter or complaint about the store? Start with the 72-hour guide; the platform-store specifics in the store lawsuit guide apply to WooCommerce merchants nearly unchanged.

Common questions

Will an accessibility plugin fix my store?

Overlay-style plugins repaint the surface and leave the theme code as it was, and sites running overlays keep getting sued. Plugins that genuinely help are narrow tools: alt-text audits, link checkers, and a developer working through a findings list.

We switched themes last year. Does the old audit still count?

No. A theme switch replaces most of what an audit tested; treat it like moving to a new building. Re-check after every theme change, major builder update, or checkout plugin swap.

Does this matter if we only sell in the US? Only in the EU?

Both directions have teeth: US stores are the main target of ADA filings, and EU-facing stores answer to the European Accessibility Act, with German merchants also exposed to BFSG Abmahnungen. The technical bar is the same WCAG 2.1 AA either way.

Check the store before someone else does: free one-page check, or the whole-store automated audit ($149, 24 hours).