What this check inspects
Shipwork asks Google PageSpeed Insights to run Lighthouse for the page, mobile by default, and reads the accessibility category. It lists each failing audit with a plain explanation, treats the failures that make the control or the content unusable with assistive technology as errors, and orders the rest by how much they degrade the experience. It only considers the audits the accessibility category itself references, so a failing performance audit in the same response is never reported here. It reports the category score and how many audits passed.
What a failure means
Audits where a control or the content becomes unusable without assistive technology are errors. That covers text with too little contrast, form fields and drop-downs with no label, images with no alt text, links and buttons with no readable name, embedded objects with no text alternative, a page with no title or an invalid language, frames with no title, video with no captions, and ARIA attributes or references that point at the wrong thing. Heading order, tap target size, blocked zoom, automatic refresh and a missing skip link are warnings. On an EU store the standard named is WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and unresolved errors there are a compliance risk.
How to fix it
- Raise text contrast to at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text, starting with the elements the audit names.
- Give every form field a visible label, and give every link and button a readable name.
- Add alt text to informative images and an empty alt to genuinely decorative ones.
- Fix the ARIA errors rather than suppressing them, because a role or reference that points at the wrong element breaks the control for screen readers.
- Set the page language on the html element, and keep the heading order sequential.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA theme uses placeholder text as the only label for the search and newsletter fields, and a hero image is added without an alt attribute.
What the check reportsThe check reports a contrast failure on the placeholder text, a form field with no label, and an image with no alt text, with example selectors taken from the page.
The pointNone of this changes how the page looks to a sighted visitor. It changes whether a screen reader can find the search box or describe the hero, which is exactly the failure the score alone does not explain.