Mark your calendars for June 28, 2025, the enforcement date of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), and essentially the deadline for all businesses operating within the EU to achieve digital accessibility. By setting standards for accessibility features, the EAA aims to improve access to digital products and services for people with disabilities.
So, how can you ensure you’re compliant?
How retailers can improve web accessibility
Two of the ways you can make your site more accessible include ensuring every image has descriptive alt text, and all video content includes captions. And while you might have alt text on your images already, it needs to be descriptive to be helpful to users and to meet the new accessibility laws.
Screen readers cannot interpret images unless they have descriptive alt text, and any audio files should be available in a different format such as closed captions and transcripts, both of which help users with auditory impairments.
Why web accessibility is important
Having an accessible website makes the experience easier and more enjoyable for everyone. And it’s likely there are a lot more disabled users visiting your website than you think. According to the World Health Organization, there are over three billion people around the world afflicted with a visual or hearing impairment. That includes millions who are legally blind or deaf and use assistive technologies to help them browse, research, and buy your products. Those individuals might be your current or future customers.
However, four million people a year in the UK abandon a retail website because of accessibility barriers to their shopping experience, resulting in average loss of £11.75 billion in sales. That’s a lot of lost revenue!
Web accessibility isn’t just important in making your digital experience inclusive, it’s also an opportunity for you to reach a wider audience, for your content to resonate with more people, and therefore — for driving sales.
When it comes to EAA compliance, to delay is to pay
It’s not just your revenue that will be impacted if your website is inaccessible. Violation of the EAA regulations could result in a fine of up to 5% of your annual turnover. In Ireland, retailers may even face up to 18 months’ imprisonment for severe non-compliance.
EAA compliance essentially boils down to four key steps:
Running an EAA audit of your website
Use the findings to implement change
Monitor your website for EAA compliance regularly
Invest in additional training to improve your knowledge of EAA
Use those steps to determine whether your digital experience is currently accessible, and to identify areas of improvement that will ensure you become — and stay — compliant with regulations.
It’s not just about being compliant. Accessibility impacts your bottom line
An accessible website opens up a larger market for retailers to target, with significant spending power that might otherwise be inaccessible, therefore increasing business potential.
Not only does accessibility increase your reach but it also improves the user experience for everyone, resulting in a more intuitive and easy-to-use website experience overall. It also demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity, which is highly valued by shoppers today and is likely to attract more customers who prioritize businesses with ethical practices.
And — to boot — accessible websites have better SEO, meaning higher visibility in search results and consequently, new customers on your website.
It’s a win-win for all.
How do I balance scale and accessibility?
While you might be ready to implement changes to make sure your website is compliant, you might also be wondering how you manage accessibility across huge volumes of content. Doing it manually will be expensive and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be!
Generative AI tools can help with rapid alt text generation and video caption creation across all your commerce media. But that text needs to be relevant to your business and to conform to your brand guidelines. Just having some generic AI identify and then list out the contents of the image won’t cut it.
For example, your guidelines may say that you refer to people in the images as “models” rather than “woman” or “boy”. Without some governance from you, genAI won’t know to do that consistently or correctly. Additionally, you need to make that alt text available in multiple languages too, so you can reach global audiences. And again, doing that manually will be very time-consuming, and will delay your time-to-market.
Merging your workflow accessibility needs
As a customer of our headless CMS and DAM, alt text and video caption generation should also be tightly integrated with how you work with content today. It needs to happen automatically, and at scale — to support your business as it grows.
This is where Amplience can help: our Accessible Media capabilities include two powerful features that do exactly what they say on the tin: Automatic Alt Text and Automatic Video Captions.
Automating alt text for every image is absolutely critical
Automatic Alt Text is a new AI service from Amplience that enables you to automatically generate alt text for images individually, or in bulk, without intensive manual effort. Whether you have hundreds or even millions of images, here’s how it works:
Every time a new image or set of images is uploaded to Content Hub, the Amplience DAM, via API, SFTP or manually in the UI, a finely-tuned ChatGPT-4o-based service will then automatically generate descriptive alt text based on what is in the image and store it as metadata.
There is always a default language, but additional locale variants can be generated too, based on how Automatic Alt Text is configured.
Most, if not all the time, the alt text will be good to go, giving you descriptive, meaningful alt text for all your images. But if you need to, you can still edit the text by hand in the Content Hub Properties panel.
If you are adding images from Content Hub into Dynamic Content, our headless CMS, and there is alt text generated for that image, you can view and edit that alt text right within our brand-new content authoring experience.
The alt text for each image can then be retrieved reliably by the front-end environment via Amplience’s Delivery APIs or Manifest capability. Some tips and guidance for your front-end devs can be found in the Amplience docs.
By the way, you can always test out how well Automatic Alt Text works with any one of your images via the template in Amplience Content Studio.
It’s essential to have video captions for all videos
Automatic Video Captions is the other part of Accessible Media. And it’s even simpler!
First, you need to have a video transcoding profile created with captions. It’s a one-time thing, and Amplience or your SI partner can help with that.
Amplience Dynamic Media will then generate a VTT captions file for each video and each locale you specify in the profile.
Within Content Hub, you can preview the video file with captions before they are both published and then retrieved by the front-end environment. Just like with alt text, our documentation has some guidance for how to work with those in your front-end video player.
If it isn’t clear already, Accessible Media consists of AI services that are already tightly integrated with the Amplience platform and your workflows. The effort involved to get these up and running is relatively light, as it should be.
The result for your disabled customers and those who prefer to engage with your brand this way? A delightful shopping experience that they expect. And one that converts!
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, why does all this really matter? Accessibility makes for a better experience for everyone.
You now can sleep easier at night knowing that you are complying with laws around the world by making your digital properties truly accessible to everyone.
You and your team have saved on significant costs and freed up time that is better spent on the more strategic aspects of your shopping experiences, leaving the mundane and repetitive tasks to trusted AI that works in a fraction of the time.
Accessibility also edbenefits your customers who don’t have disabilities, with higher organic search traffic, lower bounce rates and more engagement with your sites and apps.
So, what should you do next?
Firstly, check the accessibility of your site today. Conduct an audit and identify where you can make improvements to make your content more accessible and inclusive. If you don’t know where to start, we’d be happy to take a look for you!
If you’re an Amplience customer today, try out a few images with Content Studio and the alt text template. Check your brand settings for things like replacement words or terms to avoid. If you don’t have access to Content Studio, we can help you out with that too. Get in touch with us here.
Work with your Amplience team to configure Automatic Alt Text with the right parameters, such as language variants.
Likewise, if you have videos on your site with spoken word tracks, you can work with your Amplience team to set up the right transcoding profiles to generate VTT captions files across languages.
If you’re a front-end developer, check out our documentation for tips on how to retrieve the necessary data and files correctly. You’re probably doing some of this already!
Ready to learn more?
Accessible Media doesn ‘t just improve the user experience for your customers, it’s about to become the law in a matter of months and it significantly impacts your bottom line.
But don’t worry! Improving your website’s accessibility is relatively low cost, and very quick and easy, so it’s a win-win for all.
We’d love to help you, so get in touch with a member of our team today.