In April 2022, Twitter launched a tool that makes it easy for all users to see when an image has alt text. This has significantly increased overall societal awareness of alt
text and how it’s used. It has also resulted in some significant misuse of alternative text for marketing or humor, but the overall impact is a significant increase in images with useful alternative text.
WP Accessibility allows you to enable a toggle to show off the alternative text on your own content images.
WP Accessibility is fairly selective about which images to choose, to avoid picking up on images where this isn’t really beneficial.
First, the plugin looks for images inside a container with the class .hentry
or .comment-content
. In most cases, that will identify post or comment content. This avoids picking up images in headers, footers, or social media navigation, for example.
It only looks for images that have an alt
attribute that is not empty, so decorative images will be ignored.
Finally, it checks the size of the image. If the image is smaller than 150px by 300px, it will be skipped. This will avoid picking up images where making room for the alt text controls will cover too much of the image.