Creating a custom AI microservice for Cloudinary
Achieving WCAG alternative text (Alt Text) compliance across your always-changing retail website can be tough. Especially when your online store has thousands of SKUs. That’s why one retail company asked us to help. We built a custom AI-driven service for their Cloudinary DAM that automatically writes Alt Text for images and shares it with downstream systems.
Why manual Alt Text is tough for retail
Some 2.2 billion people in the world have a visual disability. That’s more than a quarter of the Earth’s population, and many of those people will rely on accessibility tools and screen readers when shopping online.
If you think about all the potential customers in those numbers, getting Alt Text up to par isn’t just a fundamental of accessibility compliance; it’s plain old good business. But in fast-paced retail environments, where images change all the time, it’s often a detail that’s left behind. WebAIM’s annual reports on the top 1 million home pages consistently show that 50%+ are missing some Alt Text and that retail pages are top offenders.
When out-of-the-box AI content enrichment doesn’t work
Our client was aware of the challenges. An omnichannel retailer, they offer thousands of SKUs, often with 10+ images per SKU that each require custom-written Alt Text. The content team struggled to keep pace and just 1% of images on the website were WCAG compliant.
AI was the natural answer. But it wasn’t just a question of generating and returning accurate Alt Text to the DAM. The team needed the metadata to flow smoothly downstream to commerce, ERP, and CMS platforms.
Although a long-time and satisfied customer of Cloudinary, and aware of the excellent AI metadata enrichment and automated Alt Text plug-ins, the retailer decided the custom route would better meet their needs.
By using AI vision to generate descriptions, storing them in Cloudinary, and integrating the metadata downstream to the website frontend and other systems, we helped our retail client achieve 100% Alt Text compliance — automatically.
James van Leuven, Sr. Director of AI & Content Services | iSoftStone, Inc.
Our custom AI microservice bridges the gap
We designed and deployed a custom AI microservice to bridge that gap in Cloudinary DAM capabilities.
Now, when our client uploads images into the DAM, they’re automatically sent to an Azure-powered microservice that uses AI vision to generate precise, compliant Alt Text. The service returns the Alt Text to Cloudinary DAM where it’s saved as image metadata and then sent downstream to commerce and CMS applications.
It supports all images types from life and product to promotional assets, plus real-time and bulk uploads.
Automated content enrichment, increased Alt Text compliance
The result is a scalable, AI-driven approach to Alt Text that helps our client make digital shopping experience more accessible and strengthens their ADA and WCAG compliance.
By automating content enrichment across high volumes of imagery, the microservice supports stronger SEO and reduces the manual effort required to keep Alt Text up to date.
Teams are creating compliant images 95% faster, those images are reaching every customers, and platforms across our client’s tech stack receive accurate, enriched metadata in minutes.
Effortless efficiency, effortless accessibility.
