WordPress 7.0 will introduce a feature many photographers and accessibility advocates have long hoped for: automatic importing of Alt Text from embedded image metadata. When the release arrives in April, WordPress will read IPTC accessibility fields such as Alt Text (Accessibility) and Extended Description (Accessibility) directly from uploaded images.
This is a meaningful step forward for accessibility on the web. Alt Text allows screen readers to describe images to people who are blind or have low vision, making visual content understandable to everyone. Yet historically, even when photographers carefully wrote image descriptions in Photo Mechanic or Adobe Lightroom, those descriptions had to be copied by hand or with a plugin.
A lot of the impetus for this milestone came from Caroline Desrosiers, who announced this in a happy LinkedIn post. The founder of Scribely has been advocating for this capability for years. Her work with the IPTC community helped introduce accessibility fields into the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, and her continued advocacy helped bring the idea to the WordPress community. Her post also details the hard work of a lot of other folks, so check it out.
Camera Bits was proud to support these IPTC accessibility fields in Photo Mechanic, and we’re excited to see the broader ecosystem catching up. When WordPress 7.0 ships, photographers who add Alt Text to their images in Photo Mechanic will see those descriptions automatically appear in their WordPress posts.
It’s a small change in workflow, but a big win for accessibility.