What does it take to make a hundred-year-old luxury audio brand's digital experience beautiful and accessible to everyone? In this episode, we sit down with Giulia Miotti, Senior Manager of Content and Experience, and Felip, Senior Digital Designer, at Bang & Olufsen. Giulia and Felip share how they closed a knowledge gap across content and design teams, why they stopped treating accessibility as a constraint on creativity and started treating it as a hallmark of quality, and how a bulk fix to their heading structure resolved 85% of a longstanding issue. They also weigh in on where AI is genuinely speeding up their work, the risks of trusting AI with accessibility judgment calls, and why answer engine optimization is reshaping how they think about discoverability. A must-listen for any brand that believes luxury and inclusion should never be at odds.
Speaker 1: Linh Ho (host). Speaker 2: Bang and Olufsen — Giulia Miotti, Senior Manager of Content and Experience, and Felip, Senior Digital Designer. Each Speaker 2 turn is labeled with the individual speaking.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Welcome back to the Accessible Brand Podcast. As we continue our conversations with leaders shaping the future of digital accessibility, I'm so thrilled to welcome two guests from Bang and Olufsen, the luxury audio brand providing innovations in beautiful sound experiences, timeless design, and unique craftsmanship. Today we will hear from Senior Manager of Content and Experience, Giulia Miotti, and Senior Digital Designer, Felip, responsible for their global e-commerce platform.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Together they lead Bang and Olufsen's global e-commerce experience, design, and content, including digital accessibility. Their work was recently recognized with the Siteimprove Global Digital Accessibility Award. Giulia and Felip, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast, and congratulations again on being recognized as Siteimprove Global Digital Accessibility Award winners. We're so excited to hear from you.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia and Felip)
Thank you. You're welcome.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Why don't we start with — share a little bit about your background, your journey, what you do at Bang and Olufsen.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
My name is Giulia and I'm the Senior Manager for Content and Experience here at Bang and Olufsen. My team owns the digital face of the brand, so to speak — basically everything you see, read, and interact with on our website, which is also an e-commerce platform. We sit at the intersection of content strategy, digital experience, and commercial performance, and we work across pretty much every part of the organization inside Bang and Olufsen. We turned 100 years old last year, which is quite an accomplishment — a testament to how this brand has this historical presence but also these moments in pop culture. I experienced that myself in the nineties, when it was featured in movies or was just so iconic. And of course, because I love music and I love design and beautiful things, I think the products we make are just beautiful and extraordinary. It's a gift to work for a company connected to experiencing music in the most exciting and profound way.
Speaker 1 — Linh
It's amazing because you've also gone from a performance brand — think Adidas previously — to a fashion house, and now to luxury audio. It's quite an impressive journey and background, and I can imagine what it would feel like to work for a company like Bang and Olufsen. Felip, what about you?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
I'm a Senior Digital Designer here at Bang and Olufsen. I've been here around three years now, and while the core of my work revolves around design, my primary focus shifts quite a lot day to day. Typically it might involve managing our website's design system or creating new modules for the content team to use on a regular basis, and then also checking in on our development process and seeing how that can be optimized. I was initially drawn here as a design nerd — honestly, I found it a bit frustrating to see the Bang and Olufsen digital presence underutilized, given it's such a heritage brand that's been around for just over a hundred years. I saw that as a potential opportunity and really wanted to get my two cents in to play around with the digital voice and see what we could do to elevate it.
Speaker 1 — Linh
And I think what's interesting is you also have a background in healthcare, and you're passionate about design — you even teach design courses. I'm sure you've seen all sorts of technologies that assist design, and I'm excited to dig into more of your respective areas. So, given that the theme of this podcast is around digital accessibility — just back to basics for a second — what does digital accessibility mean to both of you? I know people tend to overuse this word.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
It was a bit of a journey to get into accessibility, as my background is more in content and branding — making the e-commerce itself and the digital experience as beautiful, branded, exciting, and commercially successful as possible. I was less involved in the smaller technical features; I'd let external agencies or developers handle that and take care of the rest. It was really a learning process for me since I joined Bang and Olufsen, and this became more of a topic inside the team for various reasons. Thanks to the collaboration with Siteimprove, we had a lot of sessions — proper educational sessions — about what it means to create content that is accessible, that works for all types of customers, readers, and people.
Speaker 1 — Linh
And Felip, for you, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
I previously worked at a scale-up environment in the web department, where we were building out promotional pages for a lot of our clients at a fast pace and large scale, which is typical for scale-up environments. When the company began expanding into the US markets, we needed to introduce stricter accessibility rules, and that's the area where I started spending more time on accessibility — leading those efforts, running workshops, and building processes for us, because we still needed to keep producing at a high pace while including these frameworks, with a team that didn't have a lot of experience with it to begin with. Over time, that education and process became second nature — at least some baseline improvements — because we took it in smaller steps, so it became embedded in our whole process rather than being a lengthy checklist nobody fully understands.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Thank you for describing that — and also for describing part of the challenge. Was there a moment it became a priority for Bang and Olufsen?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
As I mentioned, when I started we were really building up the team around the new websites we were working on. When you're so deep in building and scaling a new digital experience — implementing new platforms, new teams, new ways of working — accessibility fell a little bit through the cracks. The wake-up call for us actually came in the form of a legal challenge in the United States. As uncomfortable as it was, we had to face it and act. We needed to stop, evaluate, and ask ourselves how to fix it — how to first attack and fix the big issues causing us real problems, and how to build a system to make sure these things don't happen again, with the team aware, conscious, and understanding what to do when it comes to accessibility and building a site that performs. And yes, it's also a legal compliance thing — which can feel boring, especially for my team, since content managers are a bit free-spirited and love to be creative. When you tell them, 'No, this needs to be compliant in this way,' they're like, 'Oh my God, this is so boring.'
Speaker 1 — Linh
I'm curious about the gap between where you were and where you needed to be. When you said there was a sudden urgency, describe that gap a bit more.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
It was mostly a knowledge gap, I'd say, from my team's point of view, or from our executional point of view — we didn't know what to do or where to start. It took some time to realize some things were structural and needed to be addressed, some were just small content fixes, and others just needed a new process in place.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
I think a big part of it was consistency in how we approach accessibility. As Giulia mentioned, there wasn't a lot of knowledge in how to approach it properly. One thing we started introducing was more scheduled time for accessibility — going through reports and discussing ideas together, then checking in: how are we doing, are we following the new guidelines, are these examples working? I spend a lot of time in design systems, and I think it's a similar approach to how our content team uses our modules. If, after five or six times of making a change and following a process, we still can't do it intuitively, or parts still fall through the cracks, then we need to see what's wrong with the process and make it easier. It's a lot of back and forth.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Is there more you can add on how you navigated this internally — when it involves the legal department, compliance and governance, and then the creative team, who are more interested in creativity? How do you bring the right stakeholders together and drive that conversation for alignment?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
We needed to start by finding who was going to lead it, and from there, bring a lot of people onto the same page and get more shared responsibility, so nobody feels like the only person responsible for making this work and adhering to more accessible guidelines. We took an approach of 'we're all in this together, we're all learning together,' which makes it easier as a team effort rather than someone sitting alone trying to understand it. A big part was how the reports from Siteimprove were structured — both the automated and the manual tests — which made it much more understandable what needed to be done. Once we had that, it was easier to get more people on board, because it wasn't so abstract anymore. Especially for someone just starting out, the W3C guidelines can feel daunting, so having something much easier to understand makes it easier to get people on board.
Speaker 1 — Linh
That makes sense. Along the same lines — balancing accessibility requirements with design, and luxury brands mostly living by their visual identity — where have you felt that pull between aesthetics and accessibility requirements, and how do you drive alignment across those?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
There's a tension between the brand's need to be visually expressive, with deep, immersive, cinematic, luxurious content leading with a 'wow' effect, and sometimes function coming second — even in simple things like what color we're using for a video, or whether there's text on top of it. We were always challenging the creative team: if it's not readable, it doesn't exist, because it's a waste of energy and money to put into something that can't be read and understood by all our customers. Making sure everybody understands the brand experience matters, because the underlying platform doesn't function properly for everyone otherwise. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if not everybody can navigate it, understand what's there, or go through the purchasing journey we worked so hard to build, then it's not a luxury experience. So we stopped looking at accessibility as a constraint and started seeing it as part of what quality means for us — one more adjective that defines a quality, luxury experience. Once we framed it that way, the conversation shifted and got better understood by people. That doesn't mean it's a hundred percent done all the time — there are still moments where we need to re-evaluate or correct things afterward — but we try to keep the conversation open, especially as new people join who might not have the context previous team members have shared.
Speaker 1 — Linh
That resonates completely — it's so true that if your design, experiences, and content aren't discoverable or accessible by everyone, you've lost a percentage of your audience who can't access your site or complete the purchasing journey. There's a direct relationship to revenue, not just to the performance of the site or experience. Shifting to Felip — I'm curious about your design workflow. What does building an accessible-by-default workflow look like from a design standpoint?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
It really starts in our design system. If we can make that foundation accessible, then a lot of what's built on top of it is already heading in the right direction. A big part of that has been making sure our components meet accessibility standards out of the box. When we're creating new elements or pushing design and interaction boundaries, we like to reframe it as 'how can we make this accessible' rather than deciding something is beautiful and luxurious and then concluding it's not accessible and scrapping it. Something needing to be accessible doesn't mean it can't be luxurious or delightful for our customers — it just takes more thinking. We've had cases where we missed key points or some elements weren't up to standard; we refine those and take the learnings into new modules. For instance, we're revamping how our carousels work because we were missing keyboard accessibility there, and once that's ready we can build it into new modules from the start, or even prototype with keyboard accessibility in mind from the beginning. That becomes a core part of how we approach it. We still have a lot to fix within our core system, both in code and design, but it's an ongoing, living system that needs to evolve constantly to make sure everything keeps working properly.
Speaker 1 — Linh
I'd love to shift to AI, because we can't ignore it — it's here, and especially in this field, AI's impact on content creation and design was one of the first places it showed up, several years ago. We know AI has made it easier and faster to create content and web experiences. Do you think accessibility work will get harder or easier because of automation, or harder because of the volume and velocity of new content outpacing review capacity? Curious about your thoughts on AI's impact on what you do.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
The opportunities are so wide now. We've always struggled with limited resources and capacity — how many people, how many hours we can spend reviewing and building. With AI, we can automate and save a lot of time on things that used to be very manual, like generating alt text. It seems trivial, but if my content managers had to manually write alt text for every image we upload, that would take a lot of time. AI lets us speed up and optimize a lot of these actions, which is fantastic for a team like mine. The same goes for personalization — AI-driven content means every web experience could eventually be transformed into something tailored to each user, based on context, needs, and history. But if we train AI on content or experiences that are inaccessible, how do we know the tool is intelligent enough to detect that? So it's about making sure we train the tool in a way that's built in accessibility from the beginning, so AI already knows what to do. I hope we can still be relevant for a little while in this world — that would be nice.
Speaker 1 — Linh
And Felip, your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
I've been using AI more with manual work, trying to automate things and make them easier — for example, setting up better Jira tickets and requirements for when we're sending work to development, so it's better documented. That cuts down time and some of the guesswork. But it's become increasingly important to take a critical approach to a lot of the outputs, because some things can pass by that really don't make sense. For instance, I've seen examples of trying to use AI to generate design layouts for an online banking app meant to be used by blind people, where the AI generated an Apple Wallet-style view showing the credit card numbers in Braille — which, in a way, seems intuitive, but doesn't actually ask the deeper question of how someone would really use an app like this. It still needs a lot of work and checking. For a lot of manual tasks, though, AI makes things much easier — especially in code cleanups, since with a large development team working over time on a platform that's been around as long as Bang and Olufsen's, things get done in different ways, and AI helps standardize and run more automated audits, making patterns easier to spot. But at the end of the day, you still need to spend time reading through it and making sure it's actually relevant.
Speaker 1 — Linh
A hundred percent to what you both just said — that ties back to what you said earlier, Giulia, about losing your audience, and revenue, if content isn't discoverable and accessible. Now we're designing content and websites for both humans and AI agents. If you want to be discovered in answer engines like ChatGPT, top of mind for a lot of senior executives is: how do you make sure your brand shows up in these tools? How are you thinking about discoverability and answer engine optimization today?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
What I've learned recently, getting a bit deeper into the topic, is how technically we've had to look at the way our site is built — the basics, like schema and heading structure, the fundamental building blocks of how website content is structured. We're really starting to track how we perform as a brand across different LLMs with our specific audience — where we're cited, where we're mentioned, how we improve on citation, since those are the ones we really want linking directly back to the site — and where the content gaps are that we need to fill.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Did you have anything to add on discoverability and AEO, Felip?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
As long as we're still making high-quality, relevant content, that'll reflect well on both AEO and SEO.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Right — and Giulia, you're absolutely right too, working on the technical infrastructure. Here are some of the new measurements to look at: citations, share of voice, share of answers, citation rates. Traditionally for SEO we'd look at keywords; now we're looking at prompts and the questions people are asking. Speaking of Siteimprove for a moment — how long have you been a customer?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
I think it's been maybe five to six years.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Can it be? Something like that — it's been quite a while. We've been talking about digital accessibility as your initiative, and you've talked about the people, the process, and the workflow — but from a platform perspective, how does Siteimprove.ai play a role in your accessibility strategy?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
For us, as Felip touched on earlier, it's having continuous, clear assessment of how we're doing, where the issues are, and why — is it an issue, where and how to fix it. Having that clarity and visibility on a continuous scale is what makes it really useful and easy to work with.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
And from my end, it's also in how a lot of the manual reports are structured from the tests we get. We do bi-weekly tests with Siteimprove on specific pages, especially when we launch a new module or try a new structure, plus manual tests with specific examples and issues highlighted — which makes it easier to raise tickets for development and start working through it. Then there's the dashboard itself, which helps with regular check-ins: noticing minimum sizing issues, a contrast issue, a structural issue, and deciding whether that's a one-off ticket or a new process we need to address, because we can start to see patterns in the mistakes we make. Having a clear area to move back and forth in makes it much easier.
Speaker 1 — Linh
What kind of measurable improvements and results — maybe in scores or site performance — can you share on the progress?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
A big improvement recently was an update to our heading structure within the platform, which is quite massive. We lacked a proper heading structure throughout the entire website. As Giulia mentioned earlier, our content managers enjoy a bit more freedom and flexibility compared to other large-scale, heavily templated platforms — we take a more bespoke approach to a lot of pages, which makes for an enjoyable experience for visitors but also comes with drawbacks in standardizing things. With our findings and tests, we were able to audit our modules, get an overview of the most common uses of our heading structures, do a bulk update, and introduce an extra setting so content managers can control each heading if they need to change the semantic hierarchy of the page. That bulk change fixed around 85% of the heading structure, and now we can more easily handle the rest manually.
Speaker 1 — Linh
An off-script question — if Siteimprove were to go away tomorrow, what would happen?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
Oh my God. I hope we'd keep being diligent in our accessibility work, since we've done it for a while now, and hopefully all the learnings and fixes along the way act as a bit of a safety net. But at the same time, I like having the support and comfort of knowing someone is checking on this for us a hundred percent of the time, so we're always up to date and don't suddenly have to panic about what we're doing. There's this great companion that's always with us, making sure we're on the right track.
Speaker 1 — Linh
I love that reaction — that's how I see it too. Felip, do you have anything to add?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
Same thoughts as Giulia on that — I've done more manual accessibility work before, and I'd prefer not to go back. I've gotten used to having something very easy to navigate, and the amount of detail we get into with potential issues, and how they get flagged and prioritized.
Speaker 1 — Linh
One more question — on what's next, the future of accessibility. What do you think that looks like, especially in the age of AI?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Felip)
From our end, what we really want to focus on with accessibility on our platform is finding more novel ways to elevate the whole experience — making it more interactive, more magical, more intuitive for customers — while also making sure it's accessible from the get-go. That's going to be a big part of what we do. In terms of AI, I've seen examples of experiences being built out as you interact and prompt on a website, instead of navigating in typical ways, where everything still feels on-brand — luxurious and accessible at the same time. I think there will be more ways for people to interact with websites going forward, but exactly how our customers will want to do that is still a bit of an unknown for us. We're going into it with a curious and adaptable mindset.
Speaker 1 — Linh
An adaptable mindset is definitely what we're all going to need as we navigate the age of AI. Giulia, did you have anything to add there?
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia)
We're all trying to learn how to navigate these new worlds, and some of our very human traits — like empathy and intellectual humility — are still going to be very important. We shouldn't leave those behind or rely only on technical skills and AI to maximize things; we need to keep in mind that the work we're doing is to make sure everyone is included and can be part of what we do.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Thank you for closing us out and bringing us back to human empathy — because at the end of the day, accessibility is about the humans, and no matter how much tech we throw at it, I think human empathy and lived experience are what lead the tech forward, not the other way around. It's human-led, and tech follows. Thank you both for joining me on this Accessible Brand podcast.
Speaker 2 — Bang and Olufsen (Giulia and Felip)
Thank you. It was fun. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 — Linh
Thank you both, Felip and Giulia. That concludes this episode of the Accessible Brand podcast, and thank you, listeners, for joining. If this episode inspired you, help us share the stories and subscribe to stay tuned for the next episode. For more information about this podcast series, please visit siteimprove.com/podcast. Again, my name is Linh Ho, your host. Thank you for joining me.