Accessibility and ADA Compliance

With video increasingly common ecommerce and other websites, Amazon is tackling the challenge of developing a cost-effective way to produce commentary that would explain video content to visually impaired people. In a June 2025 blog, Amazon Web Services explained that the biggest barrier is cost, estimated at $25 a minute when done manually by engineers, script writers and actors. While still in the test phase, Amazon developed a way to use generative AI to create that content, using, among other tools, its Rekognition technology for analyzing video content and Polly text-to-speech service. The system analyzes video content, generates text descriptions, and narrates them using AI voice generation. While noting that this is only an early experiment, the developers said, “This approach can significantly reduce the time and cost required to make videos accessible for visually disabled audiences.”

Shopify offers merchants on its ecommerce platform the AltText.ai app that creates descriptive, SEO-friendly text for product images. That includes using keywords from the retailer’s product name, brand, and description in the alt text. Merchants say it has improved their SEO rankings and discoverability on Google Image Search.

An example of a startup that is using AI to make ecommerce accessible to visually impaired people in InnoSearch, which launched in 2024. It is designed to enable shopping, travel planning and other online tasks and claims to be able to access more than 1 billion products across 500,000 websites. It’s also been incorporated into the Be My Eyes app that connects the visually impaired with volunteer assistants.

The market for AI tools for digital accessibility is growing rapidly, according to Market.us Scoop, which projects growth from $4.2 billion in 2024 to $52.36 billion in 2034, a compound annual growth rate of 28.7% during the forecast period 2025 to 2034.