In 2019 the consultancy Freeney Williams ran its second Click-Away Pound survey, asking UK shoppers with access needs what they do when a website gets in their way. Sixty-nine per cent said they leave. The report valued that abandoned spend at £17.1 billion a year, up from £11.75 billion when the same survey ran three years earlier, and put the total online spending power of UK users with access needs at £24.8 billion.
You won't hear about it when it happens. The 2016 version of the survey found that only 7% of shoppers who hit a barrier ever contact the business about it. The rest take their card elsewhere, and your analytics file the whole thing under bounce rate.
Most companies that have done something about accessibility have done it to the website. Colour contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation, a statement in the footer. All overdue, all worth doing. The gap tends to open somewhere else: the video on the homepage, the demo your sales team emails out, the training module HR bought last year, the podcast marketing started in the spring.
Two channels, two different failures
A video carries its information in sound and in pictures, and each channel fails a different viewer. What's said out loud is lost to a deaf viewer. Subtitles fix that, and most firms have got the message. What's shown on screen and never spoken (the figures in the chart, the button the demo clicks, the name of the person who just started talking) is lost to a blind or partially sighted viewer, and subtitles do nothing for them at all. That second failure is the common one, and in business video it usually takes out the half of the content carrying the point.
The fix has a name. Audio description is a second narration track that describes what's on screen, timed into the gaps in the existing audio, and it's been standard practice in broadcast for years. Outside broadcast, hardly anyone buys it. If your last corporate video went out with subtitles and nothing else, you've covered one audience and missed another.
What changed in June 2025
The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, became enforceable on 28 June 2025 across all 27 member states. It reaches any business offering covered services to consumers in the EU, wherever that business is based, so a UK company selling into Europe sits inside it. E-commerce is covered. So are banking, telecoms, e-books and services that give access to audiovisual media, which have to carry access services such as subtitles and audio description, synchronised and good enough to actually use. Microenterprises under ten staff and €2 million turnover are largely out of scope. Most people reading this are not.
Check that assumption before you dismiss it. Plenty of UK businesses that don't think of themselves as selling into Europe ship to Ireland, take orders from EU customers through the same checkout as everyone else, or run training for staff in an EU office. Any of those puts the question on the table.
New services launched after that date had to comply from day one. Existing ones have until 28 June 2030, which sounds generous until you count the back catalogue. Enforcement sits with national market surveillance authorities, and the penalties are set country by country, so there's no single number to plan against.
In the UK the duty is older and looser. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments, and that has been understood to cover digital services for years without anyone specifying a file format. Public sector bodies and the suppliers who serve them work to tighter rules under the 2018 accessibility regulations. If you sell to councils, universities or the NHS, this is already turning up in tender documents, and a supplier who can answer it has an advantage over one who can't.
It isn't only the marketing video
The obligation follows the content, not the department. Onboarding modules, compliance training and internal briefings all count, and the reasonable-adjustments duty under the Equality Act applies to employees as well as customers. An e-learning course a new starter has to complete in their first week is a poor place to discover that the audio doesn't work for them. The same goes for the recorded menu on your phone system, which is often the only channel a customer has left when the website has already failed them.
Retrofitting costs more than building it in
Describing a finished video means working around an edit that never left room for the description. The narration runs wall to wall, the music sits under everything, and there's nowhere to put a sentence explaining the chart that just appeared. You end up extending shots, re-cutting, or accepting a description so compressed it helps nobody.
Commissioning it up front is a different job. The script gets written knowing a description will exist, the edit leaves the gaps, and the recording happens while the studio is already booked. Because audio description is a recorded voice, the practical move is to buy it alongside the narration: a supplier already providing your voice over services can record the main read and the described version in one session and hand over the subtitle file with them. Three separate procurement exercises collapse into one line on an invoice.
Check the language coverage while you're there. A German subtitle file paired with an English-only description is a common way to end up half-compliant across an entire market, and it's the kind of thing that gets caught late, after the campaign has gone live.
Where to start
Take what you already have and rank it by traffic. The homepage video, the product demo and the onboarding module carry more weight than sixty clips sitting in an archive nobody visits. Fix those first, then decide honestly whether the rest earns the spend before 2030. Some of it won't, and retiring a video is a legitimate answer.
For anything new, put it in the brief. Ask for a described version, an SDH subtitle file and a transcript as standard deliverables, in every language you publish in, and make them part of the quote instead of a change request later. Then update the accessibility statement on your site when the work lands, because that page is the first thing a regulator or a complainant will read.
There's a version of this argument that's only about fines, and it undersells the case. The Family Resources Survey put the number of disabled people in the UK at 16.8 million in 2023/24, a quarter of the population, and the proportion has risen in every age group over the past decade. Add everyone who watches video with the sound off on a train, or turns captions on because the room is noisy, and the audience for a properly finished video is a good deal larger than the compliance conversation suggests. The £17.1 billion the Click-Away Pound report identified didn't disappear. It went to competitors whose sites and videos worked.
