Originally published August 2025. Updated November 2026 to add how to check your site’s accessibility, customer results and current Amplience product names.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied since 28 June 2025, making web accessibility a legal requirement for many businesses selling in the EU. For commerce teams, a critical focus is ensuring all digital media is compliant. In practice, this means your images and videos must meet established technical benchmarks, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to be accessible to people with disabilities.
So, how can you ensure you’re compliant?
Key takeaways
The EAA has applied since June 2025, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the benchmark for accessible images and video.
Every image needs descriptive alt text, and every video with speech needs accurate captions.
Around 1.3 billion people live with a significant disability, so accessibility widens your market and improves the experience for everyone.
Amplience Automatic Alt Text and Automatic Video Captions generate both at scale, in multiple languages, inside Amplience DAM.
Automated checks such as Lighthouse confirm the structure, but people still need to judge the quality of the content.
What does the EAA require for images and video?
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. WCAG 2.2 is the latest version of the guidelines.
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. A key part of a video accessibility audit, for example, is checking that all spoken content has accurate, time-synchronized captions.
Why does accessible media matter for retailers?
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, around 1.3 billion people, or 1 in 6 of the world’s population, live with a significant disability, and at least 2.2 billion have a vision impairment. Many use assistive technologies to browse, research and buy 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 an 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.
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.
What are the financial penalties for non-compliance?
Inaccessible websites cost more than lost sales. Each EU country sets its own penalties under the EAA, and they vary widely, from fines to orders to fix or withdraw a service. In Ireland, the most serious breaches can carry up to 18 months in prison.
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.
How do you check how accessible your site is?
A Google Lighthouse report is a quick place to start. Its accessibility score is a weighted average of pass-or-fail audits, so a page gets no credit for partly passing one. If some buttons have accessible names and others don’t, that audit scores zero.
The audits check whether a screen reader can find its way around the page: whether every element is labeled, in a logical order, with text that can be read aloud. Structured content helps here. Amplience CMS stores content in labeled fields, including small but important pieces such as button labels, so the front end can present everything clearly.
Crate & Barrel built accessibility into its front-end modules on Amplience and reported Lighthouse accessibility scores of 94 and above, without extra developer work on each piece of content.
Lighthouse checks the structure, not the content. A page can pass every audit and still be hard to follow. User testing, ideally with people who use assistive technology, catches what automated checks miss.
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.
How does Amplience automate accessible media?
If you use Amplience CMS and Amplience 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: Amplience 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 images at scale
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 Amplience DAM, by API, SFTP or in the interface, an AI service generates descriptive alt text based on what’s in the image and stores it as metadata.
There is always a default language, and you can configure additional locale versions.
Most of the time the alt text is ready to use. You can still edit it by hand in the Properties panel in Amplience DAM.
When you add an image to content in Amplience CMS, you can view and edit its alt text right in the content form.
Your front end retrieves the alt text through Amplience’s Delivery APIs. The Amplience docs include guidance for front-end developers.
Amplience Workforce can also generate alt text as a step in a Flow when assets are added to Amplience DAM, alongside tags and other metadata.
Retailers are already seeing the difference. The White Company uses Automatic Alt Text across hundreds of images, removing a manual task and keeping its visual content in line with accessibility standards. Tapestry has automated alt text for brands including Coach and Kate Spade, and one fashion retailer saves each team member 9 hours a month by automating alt text on marketing images.
Automating video captions for accessibility
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.
In Amplience DAM, 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!
Why does all this matter?
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 benefits 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, work with your Amplience team to configure Automatic Alt Text with your brand terms, words to avoid and language versions.
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 is now the law and it significantly impacts your bottom line.
Improving accessibility doesn’t have to be slow or expensive, especially when the repetitive work is automated.
We’d love to help you, so get in touch with a member of our team today.