How Joy Organics Went From an Overlay Widget to WCAG Conformance in Two and a Half Weeks

THE SCENARIO

Joy Organics is a family-founded CBD and hemp brand in Fort Collins, Colorado, started in 2018 by Joy Smith, who looked at the market that had just opened up and found it wanting: unclear labels, inconsistent testing, little transparency. What she and her family built was the answer to that, and it is still the entire positioning: the number one USDA-Certified Organic CBD brand, third-party lab results from an ISO-accredited laboratory, a 4.8-star average across roughly 8,000 reviews, citations in Healthline, Forbes Health and WebMD. In a category where trust is the product, the storefront is not a shop window. It is the proof.

Which makes it a substantial piece of software. The catalogue is merchandised twice over - by product type across gummies, tinctures, softgels, topicals and pet products, and again by outcome across sleep, mood and stress, and joint and muscle. Layered on top are a product-matching quiz, subscribe-and-save, a VIP loyalty programme, a lab-results library, an editorial blog, live chat and a third-party reviews app. All of which are across two Shopify storefronts on a shared theme and roughly eighteen templates.

Every one is a surface where conformance can quietly lapse. None of it, though, was anyone's job. Vanessa Van Watermeulen Fales is Joy Organics' project manager, but as she puts it, her role is "a lot broader than that - email marketing, the blog, strategy, SEO. Pretty much any aspect of the business."

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THE CHALLENGE

Joy Organics had bought an accessibility overlay — a UserWay widget — and, in practice, nothing else. It had gone in because the brand's design and its accessibility obligations appeared to be in tension, and one line of JavaScript promised to settle that without touching the theme.

“It wasn't really a high priority for us until we were faced with this lawsuit. So we installed the widget and pretty much left it at that. It wasn't an ongoing project for us.”

— Vanessa Van Watermeulen Fales, Project Manager, Joy Organics

The widget's real failure was not doing too little. It was making the site look finished. Scanners run with UserWay active returned zero issues; run again with it closed, the homepage alone returned 66, because an overlay does not change the source code it sits on top of. Underneath sat the ordinary debt of a fast-growing Shopify store: alt text a previous SEO agency had auto-filled with each page's H1 plus a number, a reviews app missing ARIA labels, roughly eighty issues per page.

This is among the most common patterns in ecommerce website accessibility: a capable team, a healthy storefront, a widget in the footer, and a clean scan that measures the widget rather than the site. What goes unmeasured goes unclosed.

“Michael reached out to Todd, our COO, and proposed making our sites compliant when it comes to accessibility. It was a fitting time, because we were facing a lawsuit over our website not being compliant due to accessibility issues. We met with Michael, and Todd decided we should move forward.”

— Vanessa Van Watermeulen Fales, Project Manager, Joy Organics

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THE SOLUTION

TestParty did not install anything. The engagement settled into a rhythm: automated and manual audits across both storefronts, WCAG failures identified in the source, and fixes written as pull requests into Joy Organics' own repositories for their developer to merge. Scans run on the 13th, reports publish on the 15th, and merging has averaged fifteen to thirty minutes a month.

The division of labour was the point. TestParty owns finding the issues and writing the fixes; Joy Organics' developer owns the repository and the release. Nobody in the business had to acquire accessibility expertise, which is what makes the model workable for a team with no dedicated accessibility owner. Kickoff was November 7, 2025, followed by fortnightly check-ins.

“They were pretty short. It was mostly the TestParty team going over the main changes — during kickoff you're getting us compliant, and then down the road you're scanning to see what needs to be updated. So it was really just informing us of the changes, which is helpful, so we can be aware of what's going on. We didn't really have any issues. It was smooth communication, smooth execution.”

— Vanessa Van Watermeulen Fales, Project Manager, Joy Organics

TestParty also drafted the accessibility statement Joy Organics now publishes. The account has since come off onboarding calls onto an asynchronous cadence — scans that find and fix rather than find and report, arriving as merge-ready work.

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THE RESULTS

Joy Organics went from kickoff to a storefront in good shape in two and a half weeks — November 7 to November 26, 2025, both dates from Vanessa's own notes. The pace matches what TestParty targets for brands working against a live legal deadline.

The second result answers the fear that put the widget there. Across the entire remediation the most visible change was a contrast correction on small body text — 6.78 to 7.15, one colour made slightly darker. That is the whole visual cost of conformance here; the changes were, Vanessa says, "so minor that I don't think anyone on the team noticed."

The most durable result is public. Joy Organics now publishes an accessibility statement, linked from the footer, documenting its work toward WCAG 2.2 AA, ADA and Section 508 conformance: automated and manual audits, remediation inside development sprints, continuous monitoring. It also states plainly that some integrations come from third parties the brand does not manage — the difference between a documented programme and a widget claiming a finished job.

“The best thing I can say about TestParty is that it has taken something that could have been a very big issue for us, and now it can stay in the background where it should be. Accessibility shouldn't be something our team is constantly working on. It should just be working in the background so we can focus on other projects.”

— Vanessa Van Watermeulen Fales, Project Manager, Joy Organics

By July 2026 every image was properly labelled and scanning had moved to weekly. Vanessa reported no surprises, and would tell another CBD or wellness brand on Shopify it was worth doing: "Yes, absolutely." Asked to sum it up, she reached for a metaphor about health.

“I appreciate how easy the whole process has been. When your body is healthy, you never think about your health — you take it for granted. It's not until you're sick that it becomes a real problem. TestParty sort of keeps us healthy to the point where we don't have to think about it, which is great, because that's exactly what I think it should be doing.”

— Vanessa Van Watermeulen Fales, Project Manager, Joy Organics

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THE ROAD AHEAD

Weekly scans continue, remediation ships monthly, and the reports arrive whether or not anyone at Joy Organics is thinking about accessibility that week. That is the design — and the harder thing to sustain, because a storefront under constant revision is a moving target. Theme updates, new landing pages, a swapped-out reviews app: each is a chance to reintroduce what was closed in November.

Joy Organics is not planning to make accessibility a marketing angle; asked directly, Vanessa said it hadn't come up. That is a fair reflection of where digital accessibility sits for many ecommerce teams — not a campaign, but a standard that has to hold without anyone watching it. And for brands still on an overlay, Joy Organics settles it both ways: the widget hid 66 homepage issues behind a clean scan, and removing it cost a single shade of grey.

Read how ITO EN replaced accessiBe, or how ANINE BING ended a two-year accessibility project.

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