How Marukai Built Accessibility Into Its Shopify Hydrogen Rebuild With a One-Person Development Team

THE SCENARIO

In 1965, brothers Richard and Hidejiro Matsu, sons of the founder of Marukai Trading, opened one of the very first Japan-based retailers in the U.S. market. Sixty years later, Marukai Corporation U.S.A. runs 16 locations across California and Hawaii under the customer-facing Tokyo Central brand, describing itself as the ultimate one-stop destination for Japanese grocery and lifestyle needs. Marukai is the corporation name; Tokyo Central is the brand shoppers see.

The company organises itself around four things: education and experience, an assortment of over 20,000 authentic ingredients, seasonings and tools, pricing researched market by market, and customer service rooted in omotenashi, the Japanese spirit of wholehearted hospitality, in a store that feels like a welcome. That last pillar is the one this story turns on, because hospitality that stops at the front door of the physical store is not hospitality.

The digital storefront carries a lot of that weight. Tokyo Central sells party trays for pre-order, runs local delivery, publishes a weekly ad, programmes a Japanese Local Fair, maintains a Discover section of recipes and cultural writing, and operates a store locator across all 16 locations, alongside newsletter sign-up by store and the Rice Card loyalty programme. It is a grocery site with the surface area of a content publisher, which is why ecommerce website accessibility here was real engineering work.

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THE CHALLENGE

Marukai was rebuilding the entire site, moving from WordPress to a headless Shopify Hydrogen storefront, and Jeffry was handling accessibility himself. He is the developer, the reviewer and the merger, and he had spent months of the redesign hand-picking colours that would pass contrast thresholds. The cost was not only his time. It was the internal negotiation that followed every finding.

This is among the most common patterns in digital accessibility work at mid-sized retailers: one capable person absorbs the standard as a side responsibility, learns enough to be genuinely useful, then discovers the standard does not hold still. Reviewing the findings later, Jeffry was direct about the limit he hit: “I was trying to fix everything, but I missed something. So it’s a good thing that you guys are here.”

The second limit was the standard itself. An accessibility audit is a snapshot, and WCAG is a moving target.

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THE SOLUTION

Marukai met TestParty at Shoptalk in March 2026, signed in June while the replatform was still in flight, and started before the new storefront reached its target go-live. That sequencing matters: remediating a site being rebuilt is cheaper than the same work on one that has just shipped, because the code is already open and the team is already deploying.

TestParty works in the source code. Findings arrive as pull requests against the Hydrogen repository, where Marukai’s colour tokens live in the Tailwind configuration and CSS custom properties, not in a runtime script layered over the page. The distinction between tools that fix and tools that only report is the whole engagement here: a scanner would have handed Jeffry a longer list, and an overlay would have left the markup untouched. Asked in one sentence why he chose to partner rather than keep building it himself, his answer was about time and about risk.

What did not change was who owns the code. Jeffry reviews and merges every accessibility pull request personally, which he estimates takes one to two weeks, a window that covers all of his review work rather than accessibility alone. Marukai also has sister companies whose sites are managed by an outside vendor, and that comparison shaped the decision.

The cadence now runs weekly scanning with monthly remediation, plus a monthly service that generates alternative text for unlabelled product images. Jeffry had already built his own alt-text agent, a fair position on what AI accessibility tooling can and cannot do, and enrolled anyway, as a second pass against what he might have missed.

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THE RESULTS

The first audit, reviewed with Marukai on August 4, 2026, covered the whole storefront: 277 issues remediated, 18 on product pages, none on collection pages, and 259 across the remaining pages, which is where a grocery site keeps its real complexity, the about page, the weekly ads, the Discover section. The same pass corrected screen reader and keyboard navigation behaviour through the main menu bar.

The visual footprint was small, which was itself the finding. Only two colours needed changing: a green used on the home page, locations and weekly ads, and a grey used on the home page, Discover and the Japanese Local Fair page. Both were darkened only as far as the contrast thresholds required. That validated months of Jeffry’s own work and caught what hand-checking could not.

On product images the baseline was absolute: not one carried alternative text when TestParty first scanned. Those are now covered by the monthly labelling service, which matters twice over, once for shoppers using a screen reader and once for how discoverable a Shopify catalogue is to AI shopping agents, which read the same markup. Marukai’s accessibility statement is live and linked from the footer, and the team wrote and published it themselves before TestParty offered a draft. It names the partnership directly, describing TestParty as “an AI-driven accessibility remediation platform, integrating automated testing into our QA and development cycles,” and it states known third-party limitations openly, including embedded map widgets that lack full keyboard navigation.

Five weeks after that first audit, Jeffry’s read is measured, and worth quoting as he gave it: “everything is working as expected for now. We know what’s the problem. We know that some problem can be fixed, some problem we have to ignore it.”

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THE ROAD AHEAD

The cadence continues, and Jeffry expects the volume to fall. “I think it’s going down, so maybe in the future it might be faster,” he said of the review load, which is what accessibility monitoring is meant to do to a backlog over time.

Asked what he would tell another developer at a retailer of Marukai’s size, one person in-house rebuilding a site and carrying accessibility alone, his answer was one sentence.

It is the conclusion lean teams reach across the category, whether they are a grocery chain or a breakfast-cereal startup right-sizing accessibility work, and it is why WCAG conformance is better treated as a maintained property of the codebase than a project with an end date. Marukai has run that way since the new storefront shipped. For a company that has spent 60 years sharing authentic Japanese culture through quality food, everyday essentials, and a commitment to community, extending omotenashi to every shopper who arrives with a screen reader is not a box to tick. It is the same welcome, at a different door.

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