AEM + Edge Delivery: Accessibility at Scale for Regulated Teams

Executive summary 

Accessibility isn’t a once-a-year audit—it’s a production discipline. Use Adobe Experience Manager (Sites, Assets/Content Hub, Forms, Edge Delivery Services) as your accessible baseline, wire automated checks into CI/CD, and use GenAI to draft the grunt work (alt text, transcripts, plain-language summaries) with human review. BFSI and public-sector sites have zero margin for error; ship inclusive experiences continuously, not just compliant PDFs occasionally. 

Why “beyond compliance” matters 

Legal frameworks (WCAG 2.2 AA mapped to ADA/Section 508, EN 301 549/EAA, GIGW, AODA, etc.) keep you out of trouble. But compliant-yet-unusable still means abandoned claims, failed KYC, and angry citizens. Accessibility, done right, improves task completion, trust, and reach—especially for payments, claims, subsidies, and policy downloads. 

Make AEM your accessible baseline 

• AEM Sites: gives you semantic HTML, clean structure, and templated components. Lock accessible patterns using Editable Templates and policies so authors can’t accidentally break headings, labels, or ARIA. 

• AEM Assets + Content Hub: centralize on-brand content so teams reuse approved assets with proper alt text, captions, and licensing—at scale. 

• AEM Forms: powers accessible enrollment: labeled fields, logical tab order, descriptive errors, and tagged PDFs when documents are mandatory. 

• Edge Delivery Services (EDS): modernizes delivery with a front-end-first, composable path that helps you hit top-tier performance—critical because slow ≈ inaccessible for many users. 

• AI Assistant for AEM: reduces author/admin friction, so teams follow the right patterns faster. 

Bottom line: Treat the design system (tokens, components, do/don’t examples) as your single source of accessible truth and enforce it in AEM. 

Automate with GenAI (responsibly) 

GenAI is an accelerator, not an alibi. 

• Alt text & captions drafts: Prompt models with business taxonomy and PII rules. Authors approve before publish. 

• Transcripts + summaries: Auto-transcribe videos; generate chapter markers and plain-language summaries for low-literacy users. 

• Reading-level & contrast checks: Propose B1-level rewrites and flag risky color pairs against your token set. 

• Form hints & error messaging: Generate once, bake into components. 

• Persona red-teaming: Have a model “play” keyboard-only, screen-reader, low-bandwidth users to surface friction. 

Guardrails: Human-in-the-loop review, prompts in version control, and no sensitive data to external endpoints. Rejection reasons feed back into the design system. 

CI/CD hooks: make accessibility a build-breaker 

• PR-level checks: Integrate axe-core/Pa11y with Playwright/Cypress. Fail builds on critical violations (contrast, missing labels, focus traps). 

• Component contracts: Snapshot and tab-order tests for headers, nav, tabs, accordions, carousels, and forms. 

• Content linting: Pre-publish rules block pages missing alt text, captions, or language attributes. 

• PDF gate: Validate tagged structure/reading order; quarantine non-conformant files. 

• Perf + a11y together: Track Lighthouse accessibility with TBT/LCP—performance is an accessibility feature. 

• Dashboards: Trend violations/page, time-to-fix, and % components under test so product owners can’t plead ignorance. 

EDS simplifies the front-end surface, which makes it easier to keep tests green. 

Operationalizing for BFSI & Government 

Accessibility at scale is 80% governance, 20% code. 

1. Policy & standards 

Adopt WCAG 2.2 AA as your global baseline and attach local annexes (ADA/508, EN 301 549/EAA, GIGW, AODA, etc.). Publish a design-system addendum: color tokens, focus styles, motion reduction, component dos/don’ts. 

2. People & process 

RACI: Designers (contrast, focus), Authors (plain language, headings, link purpose), Engineers (semantics, keyboard flow), QA (automated + assistive-tech testing), Compliance (high-risk flows like KYC, payments, claims, subsidies). 

Training: Role-based micro-courses (30–60 mins) refreshed quarterly. 

SLAs: Severity labels for a11y bugs with non-negotiable fix windows. 

3. Data & KPIs 

Leading: axe violations per page/PR, % components with tests, PDF compliance rate, time-to-fix. 

Lagging: Task completion for assistive-tech users, call-deflection on self-service, complaint volume. 

Research cadence: Lightweight screen-reader and keyboard-only sessions every release train. 

4. Risk-based focus

Prioritize login, KYC, payments, claims, subsidy applications, appointment booking, and status checks—plus document remediation for required PDFs. 

Common pitfalls (and how to dodge them) 

• “We passed an audit once.” Regressions happen weekly; automate checks. 

• Retrofitting at the end. Ten times costlier; shift-left into templates/components. 

• Alt-text novels. Keep it concise and purposeful; mark decorative images correctly. 

• PDF graveyards. Move high-use content to HTML; when PDFs are mandatory, tag them properly via AEM workflows. 

What “beyond compliance” looks like 

A claims portal where headings and tab order “just work.” An online subsidy form with plain-language tips that cut abandonment. Transactions that speak ARIA fluently. And an AEM + EDS pipeline that refuses to ship regressions—yes, even on Fridays. 

Make accessibility your default 

Axeno helps BFSI and government teams build accessible AEM experiences at scale—from component libraries and authoring guardrails to CI/CD accessibility gates and GenAI-assisted workflows with human review. Our team brings deep AEM expertise and years of enterprise delivery across regulated sectors. If you’re aiming for WCAG 2.2 AA (and local equivalents like ADA/508, EN 301 549/EAA, GIGW, AODA) and real user impact, we’ll get you there—and keep you there.