Vubiquity – How the European Accessibility Act Can Help Streamline Media Operations for Efficiency
Sonia Hunt, SVP, Worldwide Marketing & Communications, Vubiquity
For some, the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which began phased enforcement in June 2025, is seen as yet another regulatory hurdle. However, reality presents something far more valuable. It’s a strategic opportunity to modernize your systems and workflows and become far more efficient. By treating accessibility as part of the workflow strategy, not an afterthought, businesses can accelerate readiness, reduce risk, and strengthen long-term resilience across their media supply chain. The result could and should be a much more efficient and ideally profitable media operation.
Accessibility as a Driver of Business and Technical Resilience
Resilience in media operations isn’t just about recovering from a disaster; it’s about ensuring that your content and systems are adaptable, interoperable, and built for scale. Accessibility plays a central role in that strategy, and at the heart of that strategy is content readiness.
At face value, many media companies with disparate content catalogs will face steep challenges aligning with the EAA regulations. However, embracing AI here can be a real game-changer. Rather than manually auditing, tagging, or retrofitting content/metadata, you can leverage AI to turn accessibility from what was a bottleneck into something more of a profit machine.
Applying AI to Operationalize Accessibility
At Vubiquity, we see AI not as a silver bullet, but as a technology for identifying and resolving accessibility gaps across massive libraries. Our Catalog Intelligence platform uses machine learning and natural language processing to detect missing captions, subtitles, transcripts, or audio descriptions. It has user-friendly tools that enable you to easily transform unstructured media assets into structured, rights-aware, and globally ready content.
For example, AI can generate multilingual subtitles at scale, suggest culturally relevant alt text, or preemptively flag UI components that don’t meet screen reader standards. When combined with human oversight, these capabilities allow you to focus on strategy and delivery.
What’s important to note here is that we built Catalog Intelligence on our own expertise. The tools are therefore purpose-built for media. In other words, media workflows, compliance and other nuanced yet critical industry know-how are baked in.
This type of smart automation reduces compliance costs, accelerates time to market, and strengthens your overall content operation by aligning metadata with distribution requirements. This type of transparency and control across your archives/libraries will enable you to unlock broader revenue opportunities. For example, low-hanging fruit in the form of older and underutilized yet highly valuable IP can easily be repurposed and relicensed.
A Roadmap for Readiness
Resilience doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through early planning, thoughtful partnerships, and smart use of technology. Here is how Vubiquity is working with its customers and partners:
- Conduct a comprehensive accessibility audit: Assess content libraries, platforms, and metadata systems to identify gaps.
- Modernize localization pipelines: Integrate accessibility elements, including subtitles, audio descriptions, alt text into core production workflows.
- Leverage AI safely for automation: Use AI to automate compliance checks, accelerate adaptation, and reduce human workload at scale.
- Align for interoperability: Ensure systems and formats align with global distribution requirements, not just EU compliance.
Future-Ready Means Inclusive by Design
The EAA reflects a larger industry shift toward inclusive, standardized content ecosystems. Those who treat it as a future-facing opportunity, rather than a distant obligation, will be better positioned to navigate platform evolution, regulatory scrutiny, and rising consumer expectations.
At Vubiquity, we believe that accessibility is foundational to content readiness. With the right tools and partners, you can transform compliance into capability AND a competitive advantage.
