Did you know that 7 in 10 customers said they will abandon a website that they find difficult to use? Not only does inaccessibility impact commerce businesses financially, but it also exposes them to significant legal risks for failing to comply with accessibility laws. That’s not a situation we want our customers to be in.
Having alt text for every product image improves accessibility and drives product sales
The cumulative spending power of visually impaired people and their household continues to grow. This fact alone has attracted attention from ecommerce businesses who are actively working to ensure descriptive alt text is applied to images across their entire product catalog. But it’s no small feat.
For a typical ecommerce site, it’s generally recommended to have 3-5 images per product listing. Now scale that across a full product catalog, and consider the need for lifestyle, inspiration, and customer images too. There are even more extensive considerations for ecommerce businesses that operate internationally and need to create alt text in multiple languages for every product image.
This is a huge undertaking and demands extensive resources to manually write the required alt text, slowing time-to-market and increasing legal risk if – or more like when – they fail to add alt text to every one of their images.
Ecommerce businesses that ensure alt text is added to every one of their images benefit from financial gains such as faster time-to-market and reduced legal risk. From the already-enforced Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, to the June 2025 deadline for businesses to comply with the European Accessibility Act - and many other regulations around the world - ensuring your experiences are truly accessible is an imperative commerce businesses must address now.
That’s why commerce leaders are investing in solutions to automatically generate alt text across their entire pool of imagery, minimizing wasted time, and enabling quicker launches for new visuals and content experiences.
Automatically generate alt text with Amplience
Automatic Alt Text from Amplience provides businesses with a solution to enhance the user experience for visually impaired users across all digital touchpoints and reduces regulatory risk, without resource-intensive human intervention.
Every time a new image or set of images is uploaded to our asset management solution Content Hub, retail-focused AI will automatically generate relevant and descriptive alt text, and store it as metadata for the image. The alt text is then available to front-end experiences via Amplience’s Delivery APIs and Manifest feature. This automated process eliminates the time-intensive and costly task of manually adding alt text to each image and variant.
The solution is scalable across virtually unlimited images and supports all languages, making it ideal for global ecommerce businesses.
Ready to make your ecommerce site more accessible? Get in touch with us today to learn how Amplience can streamline your alt text generation and help ensure your shopping experiences are truly accessible and enjoyable for all!