The Same 22 Issues, Overlay On or Off: How HULKEN Moved Accessibility Into Its Code

Scenario

HULKEN sells a rolling tote that people carry, quite literally, everywhere. It was founded by Yoni Sheleg, a working musician and UX designer who spent years hauling drum equipment through the New York subway, and Alexandra Schinasi, whose father Piero spent his career designing heavy-duty industrial bags. The first order shipped in July 2018; the brand properly launched in 2020, when live music stopped and the founders packed orders by hand out of a New York apartment, and it took off after The Strategist reviewed it.

The bag is now patented, designed in Switzerland and made from industrial-grade polypropylene. HULKEN publishes a 4.9 rating against more than a million customers, and its press strip names CNN, Good Morning America, Forbes and Oprah Daily. The company calls its customers Schleppers.

The storefront behind that is not a simple one. HULKEN runs 33 products across a dozen colorways on Shopify, alongside roughly 21 bespoke landing pages and five blogs. There is a monogramming configurator with character limits, fonts and thread colors. There is a bundle-and-save page, a bulk-order tool, a wholesale application and a corporate gifting quote flow. There is a store locator, a reviews platform, live chat, two shoppable-video tools, an affiliate program and a country selector covering roughly 195 markets. All of it is run by a full-time team of seven, with Kyiv-based agency Peachy handling development.

That combination - a small founder-led team and a wide, heavily integrated storefront - is what makes ecommerce website accessibility genuinely difficult rather than a checkbox.

The Challenge

HULKEN had not ignored accessibility. It had bought a tool for it, and the tool had not worked.

This is among the most common patterns in ecommerce accessibility, and the failure mode is not obvious from the outside. An accessibility overlay is a script that loads in the visitor's browser and adjusts the rendered page. It can change how a site looks. It does not change what the site is. The underlying markup - the missing alt text, the unlabelled form control, the heading order that makes no sense to a screen reader - stays exactly as it was for anyone using assistive technology.

The scale of that gap was measurable on the very first call. TestParty ran a live scan of the HULKEN home page with the overlay disabled and found 22 issues. Running it again with the overlay enabled returned the same 22. Nothing had been resolved; the tool had been sitting on top of the problem for the better part of two years. Yoni's own counsel had told him there was no automated way out at all, only a manual check every six months - accurate advice for the tooling that existed when it was given.

His goal through all of it was straightforward: "All I wanted was this website to be compliant as much as possible. I want everybody to be able to purchase a bag easily. And that's it."

The Solution

Peachy, HULKEN's development agency, made the introduction. HULKEN signed three days later.

What closed it was not a feature list. It was the fact that TestParty's process ends in code that HULKEN's own engineers review before it ships.

That instinct points at something overlays cannot offer. Yoni wanted his developers in the loop not to slow the work down, but as a second check on a question automated tools do not ask: whether the site is still functional. "It's a double-check that if it is accessible, but is it also functional," he said. "It gave me the impression that it's a more comprehensive, holistic solution. That's why we moved fast with it."

The engagement runs on a fixed rhythm. TestParty was added directly to the Shopify theme and the GitHub repository at kickoff in June, ran a full accessibility audit of the US storefront including its third-party components, then remediated the issues at source and delivered them as a pull request for Peachy to review and merge. Scans now run weekly, manual testing runs monthly across screen reader, keyboard and zoom, and each cycle produces a dated report. Where a fix was a judgment call rather than a defect - the brand's purple accent, whose contrast ratio moved from 4.4 to 4.6 - it went to HULKEN's brand owner, and the approved value became the standing default.

The load that placed on the agency was close to nothing. "Jason sent me a pull request, we approved this, we did our part, and that's it," said Danylo Lylo of Peachy. "It took a couple of minutes."

Results

The most concrete outcome is public. HULKEN now publishes an accessibility statement committing to WCAG 2.2 AA, ADA and Section 508 standards, and it is unusually honest for the genre: rather than claiming a clean sweep, it enumerates the specific third-party components whose issues remain outstanding and which vendor owns each one. That is a checkable artifact, and it is the kind of documentation that holds up when someone asks for evidence rather than assurances.

Underneath it, the 22 issues surfaced on that first scan have been addressed in the theme's source rather than masked at runtime, and the site is now under continuous accessibility remediation rather than a six-month manual cycle. Every change is logged with the problem found and the exact code that fixed it, which turns an ongoing obligation into an evidence trail that accumulates on its own.

The clearest result, though, is the one that is hardest to put a number against: nobody at HULKEN had to do anything.

For a company running a storefront that size on seven full-time people, that is the whole proposition. Peachy's read from the engineering side matched it. "TestParty was working in the background to us," Danylo Lylo said. "This is my favorite type of cooperation, when no one actually gives you more problems or issues." Asked whether he would recommend TestParty to Peachy's other clients, he pointed out that he already had.

Yoni is reserving final judgment - "I'm skeptical until I'm proven wrong, that's my nature" - but he was clear about why he expects this one to hold. "I'm actually very positive and optimistic about it. Especially because our dev team is involved. It's not just a promise, it's an actual technicality that is being checked by our team."

The Road Ahead

HULKEN runs a separate European storefront on its own repository, which means US fixes do not propagate to it automatically, and bringing it to the same standard is the obvious next chapter, particularly with the European Accessibility Act now in force. HULKEN also already publishes an agentic-commerce endpoint for AI shopping agents, which puts it ahead of most brands its size on a question about to matter a great deal: whether a store is discoverable by an AI agent depends on much the same structured, well-labelled markup a screen reader needs.

Yoni's advice to other founder-led brands still running an overlay is shorter than any of that.

Ready to fix the code, not the symptoms?

TestParty remediates accessibility issues in your Shopify source code, reviewed by your own developers before anything ships. Book a demo or read more customer stories.