Getting Compliant: Fixing images

 Start With Your Top Twenty Pages

Do we need to fix all of our images? Short answer is very likely but I have some tips to make it easier! 

How did we get here? Well, if you are like many of us, you may have migrated from website platform to website platform and sometimes those image files lose any accessibility content associated with them. Or maybe it's more that you did a large image dump into your media library or website (or even social media!) and that was it. Or you are just now learning about accessibility (or worse, you've received a threatening letter!)

...and then you look at a media library with four thousand files in it, some (maybe most?) uploaded before anyone on the team had heard of alt text, and the whole project becomes something to think about later (until you get that letter and make a dedication to get your website and digital content accessible!)

Let's start with the practicality --> Don't try to fix 4000 images at once. Break down the work into bite size steps... and yes, if you feel comfortable using AI, you can use AI to provide Alt Text for your images.

Ok, let's talk through briefly some things to consider with using AI to create image description for Alt Text. As a caveat about AI and images, it will not recognize everything, but it's better than no description! One more thing before we talk through this more, is that you do want to be careful using AI with your intellectual property (IP), copyrighted images, and/or any which might have PII (personally identifiable information about people), or people that you know. Do you really want your likeness to be given to AI?  Just considerations for when and with what you feel comfortable using AI to help your work! 

Set a plan - Focus on top content, especially images 
What and Why? Put your time where it benefits you the most. That's one reason that we talk so much about Alt Text here as it is one of the key factors in making content inaccessible, and opens you to liability (and no one wants that, right?)

Website traffic is never evenly distributed. A small number of pages account for most of your visitors — usually your homepage, a handful of service or product pages, two or three posts that did unexpectedly well, and your contact page. Fix the images on those, and you've addressed the barriers that most of your visitors are actually encountering.

The remaining pages still matter, but they're not where people are.This is triage, and triage is the correct approach when the alternative is doing nothing

How to do that - It starts with metrics

Pull your analytics or statistics.

• • Sort by pageviews over the last six or twelve months. Take the top twenty as a starting point.
  • Add your conversion pages even if traffic is lower.

A barrier on a page with 200 visits a month that stops people from paying you matters more than one on a post with 5,000 casual readers.

Handle template and sitewide images first.  Logos, header graphics, icons, anything appearing across many pages. Fix once, fix everywhere — it's the highest-leverage work on the list.

• Then work through each page's images.  For every one, ask whether it carries information or is decoration.
  • Informative images get a sentence describing what they convey on that page.
  • If there's text in the image, that text goes in the alt text. Read it aloud; if it sounds odd, rewrite it.
  • Give decorative images empty alt text rather than skipping them. An empty alt attribute tells a screen reader to move on. A missing one may leave it reading out a filename.

Schedule the rest. Don't declare victory and forget. Put the next twenty pages on the calendar, or fold them into whatever content review you already do.

It really is an afternoon Twenty pages or maybe, it's 4 pages a day. Whatever works for you! A few images each. Just a few seconds apiece once you've got the rhythm! That's not a project requiring a budget line and a kickoff meeting. It's an afternoon with a coffee and a spreadsheet or your website — and it's one of the highest-return afternoons available to you, because you're fixing the exact barriers that the largest number of your visitors are hitting.The rest of your library can wait. It'll be there.

One thing to do at the same time

Fix how new images get published, or you'll be back here in eighteen months with a fresh backlog. Whoever uploads images to your site needs to know the six-step habit: rename the file, decide if it's informative or decorative, describe it in a sentence, leave it empty if decorative, include any text that's in the image, and read it aloud. That's the whole thing, and it takes longer to explain than to do.

Need more help? We provide accessibility audits, accessibility support, and content remediation, including working through image libraries at scale and training your team so the backlog doesn't rebuild itself. Contact us for a quote! Remember, Accessible Content is Good Content!