How South Moon Under Got Its Accessibility Fixed, Not Just Audited
A replatform that opened the question:South Moon Under moved to Shopify at the start of 2026 - opening the door for a better shopping experience for all customers.
Audit-only quotes did not solve the problem:Two other vendors quoted for the audit alone, which would have left the fixes to be paid for hourly somewhere else.
No in-house developers and no internal IT team:TestParty’s engineers wrote the remediations and shipped them into the live Shopify theme.
Nineteen days from kickoff to live:Initial audit on Jul 11, 2026, with every remediation transferred to the production theme on Jul 20.
A published statement and a cycle that keeps running:A WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility statement went live on Aug 12, followed by weekly scans, monthly source-code remediation and automated product image alt text.
THE SCENARIO
South Moon Under opened in the summer of 1968 as “a small surf shop stocked with hand-shaped surfboards, screen-printed tees, and swimwear” in Ocean City, Maryland. Fifty-eight years later it runs 27 coastal boutiques along the East Coast alongside southmoonunder.com, offering “a curated assortment of elevated wardrobe staples & on-trend fashion pieces from beloved brands and emerging designers, hand-selected for the effortlessly cool woman & man at every stage of life.”
The brand describes its purpose as cultivating confidence through style which includes having confidence in the shopping experience, whether in-stores or online. South Moon Under is one of several brands under Ames Watson, a private holding company that describes itself as purchasing, transforming and partnering with companies to create long term value. Keri Nwosu, Director of Marketing for South Moon Under, manages the website. There is no in-house engineering function, no internal IT team, and outside development help is bought by the hour. That is the ordinary shape of a mid-size specialty retailer, and it decides which accessibility vendors are actually usable.
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THE CHALLENGE
Before this year, South Moon Under sold on a legacy ecommerce platform and wasn't able to tap into new, emerging assistive technology.
The best solution available was an assistive widget, but this is not the same thing as a fully remediated site. An overlay loads on top of a page and offers the visitor a set of controls; it does not change what the page reports to a screen reader, so the markup, the link and button labels and the checkout path stay as they were built. Customers who use assistive technology bring their own tools, and those tools read the code.
The replatform to Shopify at the beginning of 2026 turned that from a background concern into an open question. Moving over, Keri said, meant the team “started exploring what we sort of needed to make sure that we were fully compliant, and providing the best experience”, handled the way she describes it now: “addressing things proactively versus reactively.”
What she found in the market was mostly the reporting half of the job. Jana Pillay, Director of Ecommerce at Ames Watson, had met TestParty’s team at several conferences, so TestParty was in the mix, but Keri ran the comparison on her own terms and the arithmetic was unforgiving.
“I got quotes from 2 other partners that only did the audit piece, and that was very expensive. And I would still have to take it to an external dev to make the fixes, which would’ve just been out of scope for us.”
- Keri Nwosu, Director of Marketing, South Moon Under
This is the practical difference between a tool that fixes and a tool that reports. For a team with no developers on staff, a findings document is not remediation, it is a bill followed by a second bill. What decided it, in Keri’s account, was that the same people who found the issues would write the changes: no handoff to a separate development team, no hourly agency to brief, and no hunt for a contractor who happened to be an accessibility specialist as well as a Shopify one. It was, she said, “all owned by the same team, and it was a team that we could trust to be experts in the field.”
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THE SOLUTION
TestParty ran its initial audit on Jul 11, 2026, covering the storefront against WCAG 2.2 AA including its third-party components. Most of what came back was invisible to a sighted visitor: screen reader and keyboard navigation work in the theme code. Two changes were visual and both were small, a contrast failure on the brand’s “sale” colourway resolved by darkening it slightly, and footer link target heights raised to the 24 pixel minimum so they could be hit reliably on a phone.
Exactly one third-party issue surfaced, an email capture teaser served through Klaviyo whose close control sat below the same touch target minimum. Rather than working around another vendor’s component in code, TestParty handed Keri the specification and she changed it in Klaviyo’s own settings.
The code work was staged in a duplicate theme so the team could preview it before anything reached customers, and the handover was built around how South Moon Under actually operates: they create new themes several times a week, so Keri names the target theme and TestParty transfers the changes in. Every remediation went live on Jul 20, nineteen days after kickoff.
The public half followed. South Moon Under had an old accessibility link in its footer. On Aug 12 it was replaced with a statement that says what the site is held to and who maintains it, live at southmoonunder.com/pages/testparty, naming WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the ADA and Section 508, with a route for visitors to report a barrier.
“It was all easier than I expected. I’m the director of marketing. I’m not a technical person. We don’t have an internal IT team and we work with external developers, but we just don’t have that technical capacity internally, and I was able to set everything up with the TestParty team’s assistance within like 5 minutes.”
- Keri Nwosu, Director of Marketing, South Moon Under
That is the outcome marketing teams who own accessibility without engineers are usually reaching for: setup measured in minutes rather than a project plan, and work that does not come back as tickets.
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THE RESULTS
Ask Keri what changed and she does not reach for a score. She describes a category of work she no longer has to watch.
“Compliance is one of those things that I sort of hope is just running in the background, and I need to be able to trust that it’s doing what it needs to be doing. That customers are being able to access the website and all the functionality that they need to be able to make a purchase, whether that’s using screen readers or some other accessibility tools. I need to know that this is being managed and not just something that gets flipped on and forgotten. The regular audits, the regular reports, the check-ins are very helpful so that I have that level of confidence.”
- Keri Nwosu, Director of Marketing, South Moon Under
What replaced the previous technology is a cycle rather than a switch: weekly scans, monthly source-code remediation with a report by email, and a second round of fixes live on Aug 26. Product image alt text is generated as part of that cycle, so new arrivals are described without anyone remembering to check. Keri’s read is that the storefront is stable between rounds, since her team is “not making big structural or development changes, it’s more just swapping in and out content.”
Like Magic Spoon right-sizing accessibility as a lean team, the win is proportionality: expert coverage at a scale a specialty retailer can carry without hiring for it.
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THE ROAD AHEAD
South Moon Under is now on ongoing maintenance rather than a project: weekly scans, monthly source-code remediation, continuous alt text coverage, and an open channel in between. Keri is clear-eyed about what has and has not been proven in a couple of months.
“I think the ultimate test is to sort of see throughout the next year. It’s only been a couple months. My hope is that yes, we were addressing everything, but I think we still need time. Time will tell sort of thing.”
- Keri Nwosu, Director of Marketing, South Moon Under
That is the right standard, and it is why the engagement is built as coverage rather than a cleanup, the same choice Satya Jewelry made. Asked whether she would point another retailer of her size at TestParty, Keri’s answer was yes, on the same grounds that decided it originally: the audit and the fixes arrive from one team, which is what makes the whole thing viable at her scale.
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