Question About Shopify Policy for Video Accessibility App

Community Feedback
1

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to build a Shopify app and would really appreciate feedback from the community.

The idea is to create an app that scans a Shopify store and identifies all pages containing videos, along with their respective links. The app would then help improve video accessibility by providing:

  • Captions (.vtt files)
  • Transcripts
  • Audio description versions

As a next step, the app would use AI to enhance the videos by adding audio descriptions directly into them, making the content more accessible.

Additionally, the app would embed an accessible video player within the Shopify store. This player would allow merchants to display both the original and remediated versions of the video, along with captions and transcripts, on any page or section they choose.

Overall, the goal is to build a complete video remediation tool as a Shopify app to help merchants improve accessibility across their stores.

I would like to ask:

  • Is this type of functionality allowed under Shopify’s policies?
  • What would be the recommended approach or flow to implement this effectively?

If there are any limitations or policy considerations I should be aware of, I would greatly appreciate your guidance.

Thank you in advance for your time and support!

2

Hi @Hamza_Zahid,

Regarding the functionality under our policies, we can’t provide official guidance on if your app would be in legal compliance with our policies or not, and we do recommend reviewing the Shopify Partner Program Agreement, the Shopify API Licence and Terms of Service, and the Shopify App Store requirements, with a legal professional for the best advice based on your use case.

As for how you would accomplish this, you could easily search for any videos on the store via the files Admin API query, which returns all files uploaded to a Shopify Store, used for product media, marketing, theme assets, etc.

Additionally, you can use the theme or themes queries to retrieve the actual theme files themselves.

To add a video player to a storefront, you would likely need to embed some code in the merchants theme directly, which can be done with Theme App Extensions and Theme App Blocks, with the App Blocks allowing the merchant to add the player via the Theme Editor where ever in the theme they wish.