The European Accessibility Act, one year in: what changed for media

The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025. A year in, the practical implications for media and public sector organisations are starting to stabilise. The text itself has not changed, but enforcement patterns, regulator guidance and a first wave of compliance audits have made it much clearer what 'accessible' actually means in day to day operations.

Captions are not optional

Live and on demand video published by in scope organisations needs accurate captions. Auto generated captions count only if their quality is demonstrably adequate. Regulators are pointing at the EBU's quality guidelines and the NER model as the reference, which means broadcasters can no longer rely on a raw ASR output dumped onto the timeline without review.

The practical answer most large broadcasters have landed on is hybrid. Production grade ASR generates the first pass, a human editor reviews and finalises before publication, and a live captioning team uses a realtime editor to correct on the fly during broadcasts.

Transcripts are now a deliverable

Public bodies are increasingly expected to publish searchable transcripts of meetings, hearings and announcements. This is not just an accessibility outcome; it materially improves transparency and discoverability. Citizens find what they are looking for through search, journalists cite primary sources directly, and the organisation itself builds a structured archive that survives staff turnover.

Translation closes the last gap

Multilingual jurisdictions (Belgium, Switzerland, the EU institutions themselves, Catalonia, the Basque Country) are extending accessibility duties to cover translation. Captions in the original language are no longer enough when a sizeable audience does not speak it. The expectation, increasingly, is that at least one additional language is offered alongside the original, and that the translation quality is reviewed rather than published raw.

What buyers are doing

The pattern we see across customers is consistent. Pair production grade ASR with a workflow that lets human editors review, correct and publish quickly. Standardise on a small number of caption formats. Treat the transcript as a first class deliverable, not a byproduct. Fully automatic remains the goal; assisted remains the reality for anything that goes on the public record.

A year of enforcement has not produced a flood of fines, but it has produced a much clearer set of expectations. The organisations that started early are not scrambling. The ones still treating accessibility as a future project are running out of room to do so.