Accessibility and performance

Benchline is built to the Shopify Theme Store accessibility and performance floors, and this page separates what the theme does from what stays in your hands.

What the theme does

• Keyboard everything. Every interactive element (menus, finder steps, variant swatches, facet filters, cart controls) works from the keyboard, with no traps. Opening the navigation or search from the keyboard moves focus into the panel, and Escape closes panels and returns focus sensibly.
• Visible focus. Focus is shown with a clear outline everywhere, including the announcement bar and the header.
• Skip link and landmarks. A skip link leads straight to the content, and header, navigation, main, and footer landmarks are labeled.
• Words with every state. Fit states, group headings in the cart, and filter states are written in text, never carried by color or icons alone. Cart groups are labeled regions with headings, so a screen reader hears the same structure a sighted shopper sees.
• Contrast-checked palettes. Every shipped style palette was contrast-computed before release: body text above 15 to 1, accents above 5 to 1, fit state pairs between 7.7 and 8.4 to 1. The floors are 4.5 to 1 for body text and 3 to 1 for large text and interface elements.
• Targets and motion. Interactive targets are at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels. Reduced-motion preferences are respected, and the slideshow keeps a no-script fallback.
• Forms with labels. Finder fields, facet filters, and checkout-adjacent forms carry visible labels, not placeholder-only fields. The machine and project fields included.
• One heading order. Templates keep a single top-level heading and a logical order below it. The finder heading level setting exists so the finder can take the top level on pages where it is the main content.

What stays yours

• Your text. Alt text on your images, plain-language product names, and specification values a shopper can act on. The theme cannot write these for you.
• Your colors. If you change the palette, hold the contrast floors above. The fit state colors in particular carry verdicts; weakening their contrast weakens the verdict.
• Your media weight. Images and video dominate page weight on parts catalogs. Upload product media at the size you display, and let Shopify serve the responsive sizes the theme requests.
• Your apps. App blocks are supported in the product sections, but an app's script weight and accessibility are the app's. Audit anything you add the way you would audit a theme change.

Performance posture

The theme adds no third-party scripts, no external font files (fonts come from Shopify through the font picker), and no extra requests for specification data: spec values render on the server, in the page, so cards, datasheets, and verdicts are present in the first response and stay correct with JavaScript off. The finder itself is a plain form; with JavaScript disabled it still submits, filters, and groups the cart, because none of those depend on script. JavaScript in the theme is progressive enhancement: variant datasheet updates, predictive search, and pickup refresh.