An accessibility checklist before holiday traffic
Test the paths holiday shoppers actually use: navigation, search, product options, cart, and checkout. Fix keyboard traps, missing labels, and low-contrast sale styling before traffic spikes, because holiday code freezes leave no room for rework.
Start with the holiday-specific changes
Holiday themes add promo banners, countdown timers, popups, and gift messaging. Each one is a fresh chance to break accessibility. Timers that announce every second can flood screen readers, so keep live-region announcements minimal or give shoppers a way to pause them. Sale banners need real text, not text baked into images.
Walk the purchase path by keyboard
Tab from the homepage through search, a product page, variant pickers, the cart drawer, and the checkout handoff. Every control should show a visible focus indicator and be operable without a mouse. Quantity steppers and size selectors are the usual failure points. If you get stuck somewhere, a keyboard-only shopper gets stuck there too.
Check contrast on actual sale styling
Red sale badges, gray fine print on discount terms, and white text over busy hero images fail contrast checks constantly. Test the rendered colors in the browser, not the values in the design file. Holiday overlays sit on top of product imagery, which makes this worse than it looks in a mockup.
Log everything before the freeze
Most stores freeze theme changes sometime in November. Record which pages you tested, what failed, what you fixed, and how you verified it. An issue found during the freeze is a choice between breaking the freeze and shipping an inaccessible store through your biggest revenue weeks. Neither is good.
Sources and testing references
These sources describe accessibility techniques and WCAG success criteria. They do not by themselves establish legal compliance.