A while back, a developer told me something that stuck with me. He said fixing Shopify Liquid files is a hassle, because customizations don't scale with theme updates. The moment you start editing a theme, you've effectively forked it, and every future update has to be diffed and re-applied by hand.

He's not wrong. That's effectively how maintaining a customized Shopify theme works.

It's also why many teams avoid deep changes to a live theme, accessibility remediation included.

Accessibility fixes often require changes that only exist in Liquid templates: adding semantic HTML, correcting heading hierarchy, exposing labels to assistive technology, or fixing landmark structure. Those aren't changes you can reliably layer on afterward with CSS or JavaScript.

But "that's just how Shopify works" is where the conversation usually stops. I don't think it should stop there. The fork isn't a Shopify problem. It's a process problem. And process problems have process answers.