Formatting for Accessibility

To ensure the greatest consumer awareness and retail coverage for your items, it is important to format your content to help shoppers with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disabilities. 

Specifically, guidance for websites that cater to European customers or companies that do business in Europe is provided by the European Accessibility Act. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is an EU directive that aims to make a wide range of products and services across the European Union more accessible to people with disabilities. The American equivalent to the EAA is a combination of U.S. disability rights laws and accessibility standards rather than one single directive. 

Suggestions for making content accessible to users with disabilities 

Images 

Minimize/eliminate text that is embedded within an image. This text cannot be read by screen readers. For text on product packaging, it is better to include this text elsewhere, such as the Product Description page (PDP). 

Include important item information on the PDP as text. Details such as dimensions, health claims, features, ingredients and other specific attributes should be included as text. 

Include Alt text where prompted. These short alternative descriptions (100 characters) can be included with any web image. Alt text is used to describe images for accessibility browsers with a screen reader. Adding Alt text by including a caption allows authors to keep images within a design and still provide the content in an accessible format. 

Use descriptive text in calls to action. For example, “Learn More” isn’t always clear; “Learn how to care for your product” helps the reader understand the context. 

Consider color contrast.  Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA, requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text, and at least 3:1 for graphics and user interface components. You can check your contrast here. 

Accessible Structure & Navigation: Design website and webpages such that they are navigable with screen readers and keyboards. 

Color and Contrast: Design your pages such that users can perceive text regardless of color blindness or low vision. 

Videos 

Videos should not include embedded text. Similar to photos, they cannot be translated by screen readers. Use caption or transcripts (as expanded on in the point below). 

Include Closed Captions and Transcripts. Closed captions are timed transcriptions of audio files. Transcripts are a complete translation of your video’s audio into text. Transcripts differ from closed captions because they also can describe what’s going on in the video (e.g. “outside in a park”). WebVTT format is designed to provide closed captions and transcripts for video content. 

Audio Descriptions: Similar to transcripts, videos should include narration that describes visual details important for understanding the video (e.g., “The model turns the jacket inside out to show the lining”). This is especially relevant for product demo videos where visuals explain features. 

PDFs 

Ensure PDFs are accessible when they are created. Your PDF creation software can help you address accessibility issues, such as a missing document description or title. It looks for common elements that need further action, such as scanned text, form fields, tables, and images. 

Upload your PDFs. Once your PDF is accessible, simply upload it as another one of your Enhanced Content assets. Please ensure to add a Caption (used as Alt text) for your PDF. It’s the same process as described above for Images. 

Tagged PDFs (Structure): PDFs must include tags that define the document’s structure (headings, lists, tables, paragraphs) and allows screen readers to read content in the correct order. 

Searchable Text: The text must be real, selectable text, not just an image of text. Scanned PDFs must use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to make content readable.