Rethinking Video Accessibility for Amazon Ads
Nov 2024 ~ Feb 2025
Built Amazon Ads’ first scalable accessible video experience across sponsored ad formats to create more inclusive and adaptable playback experiences.
My role
In late 2024, Amazon kicked off a company-wide Accessibility program across shopper-facing design teams, and I was part of the Ads workstream focused on improving accessibility across sponsored ad experiences, including video formats and playback experiences.
Under a tight timeline, I led the redesign of accessible video experiences across Amazon Ads campaigns. I collaborated closely with Accessibility, Legal, Localization, and Engineering teams to define scalable accessibility behaviors for sponsored video experiences
Context
Over 1 billion people worldwide live with disabilities, making accessibility a critical part of digital product design. As part of Amazon’s company-wide Accessibility initiative, I led the Ads accessibility workstream focused on redesigning video playback experiences at scale.
Challenges
Without an existing accessibility framework for video playback, I needed to define entirely new accessibility behaviors across highly variable sponsored video formats while building scalable patterns that could support future use cases.
As accessibility was also a new domain for me, quickly ramping up on accessibility standards while collaborating across multiple teams under a tight timeline became an additional challenge.
Design Principles
Accessibility is not optional - The solution needed to support not only existing ad formats, but also scale for future video experiences and evolving accessibility needs.
Unified design patterns - The experience should remain consistent across services.
Start from auditing
Started by auditing video experiences across Amazon surfaces beyond Ads formats, which provided a solid understanding of existing video use cases, playback features, and shopper behaviors across different Amazon experiences.