EAA for Brands – What Do You Need to Do?
Back in late June 2025, The European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into effect across the member states of the EU, designed to harmonise accessibility requirements across a number of digital services and products.
Historically, online accessibility for a number of disability requirements has been served inconsistently, not just between different countries but across industries as well, excluding significant portions of the population from easily participating in an increasingly online world, and limiting brands access to these under-served audiences.
One of the services specifically impacted by these requirements is online retail. And now, almost nine months after the act came into effect, we’re still encountering brands who have questions and confusion about how best to make sure their products meet EAA requirements.
What is Required by EAA for Online Retail?
The act has many facets and is understandably wide-ranging, so we’ll be focusing on:
“making websites, including online and mobile apps, easily accessible in a consistent and adequate way by making them perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.”
For brands this means ensuring that the product content you provide your retail and syndication providers includes adequate accessibility features to meet the EAA requirements. Obliviously, plain textual content is something that can be easily formatted by all accessibility systems into a state that can be understood by disabled users (screen readers, etc.).
However, graphical elements require alt- or descriptive text, not only to describe the visuals within, but to relay any text content within the the image itself which will not be recognised by some systems. This goes doubly for video or animated content, especially that with an audio component which will require subtitles and audio description. Many of these require specialised file types top be created and provided alongside the standard content assets traditionally sent to retailers ahead of a product launch.
These additional requirements have left many scratching their heads about how to tackle this task, especially if faced with product categories numbering in the thousands.
How Best to Create and Organise Accessible Product Content
In the face of such a daunting task, our advice is simple: deal with it downstream.
Tackling a catalogue-level issue is going to be one with considerable pain, but if you focus only on the new and updated content from this point onwards, it becomes more manageable and still allows your products to meet what the EAA allows.
More than that, the focus of the EAA is on the platform owners – namely the retailers themselves. So the burden ultimately rests with them – so much so that a number of them (such as Amazon) have started implementing systems deal with the automation of some of these requirements themselves. At the very least, your retail and syndication partners should be giving you a clear picture of what they expect in terms of accessibility assets.
Where the responsibility of generating these assets falls upon you, help is at hand. Most PIM services have incorporated these accessibility needs into their systems already, and are adept at creating the assets needed as part of their usual product content process flows. They have specific expertise and automated systems they can use to generate with the minimum of pain and cost, and essentially provide you with the same content experience as before, but with the additional assets included.
Our Digishare platform is already set up with these systems, and our team has years of experience in making sure your content is as accessible and it is compelling.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you get full coverage, everywhere.