Every Image on Your Site, Described

The number is smaller than it feels

Somebody told you every image needs a description and the site has hundreds, so it sounds like weeks of work.

In practice most of those images are repeated across pages, and a large share are decorative and need no description at all.

A forty-page small business site typically has between forty and eighty distinct images, of which perhaps a third genuinely need writing.

That is a single afternoon, done once, and then a habit of a few seconds per upload afterwards.

Build the list first

• The media library if you have one.
• A free accessibility checker run on the site.
• The template images: logo, icons, background.
• Anything in a slider or gallery.
• Images inside PDFs, noted separately.

The second is the fastest route. Several free tools will crawl a site and list every image with a missing or empty description, which turns a vague and open-ended task into a numbered list.

Sort before you write

Which is what keeps this to an afternoon.

Three piles: decorative, meaningful, and images that contain text.

Decorative gets an empty description, which is a deliberate mark rather than leaving it blank, and takes no thought.

Meaningful gets one line each, which is where the actual work is.

Images containing text need the text itself written out, and are the ones worth reconsidering entirely.

Sorting a hundred images into three piles takes about twenty minutes and removes most of the writing before it starts.

A worked example

A business ran a free checker and found a hundred and forty-one images flagged.

Sorting them, ninety-two were decorative or repeated template elements, thirty-eight were photographs of work, and eleven contained text.

The ninety-two took ten minutes as a batch, since they all got the same treatment.

The thirty-eight took about ninety minutes at roughly a minute and a half each.

The eleven with text were mostly old promotional graphics that were replaced with actual text on the page, which improved the site anyway.

Total: one afternoon, for a site that had been flagged as having a hundred and forty-one failures.

Do the templates first

Since they appear on every page and fix many failures at once.

The logo, the header, the icons in the footer, and anything in the navigation.

Those are one edit each and each resolves the same failure across the whole site.

An automated report counting a missing logo description as forty separate failures is counting the same problem forty times.

Fixing the templates typically removes half the reported count in fifteen minutes, which is worth doing before anybody looks at the number again.

It also makes the remaining list honest, since what is left is genuinely a hundred separate decisions rather than one repeated.

Do not write descriptions for everything

Which is the mistake that makes this a project.

A background texture, a divider, a decorative flourish, and an icon sitting beside text that already says the same thing all need nothing.

Writing a description for those makes the site worse, since a screen reader then announces a decorative swirl to somebody trying to read the page.

The test is whether somebody who cannot see the image would miss anything if it were not mentioned.

Where the answer is no, mark it decorative and move on, which is the correct outcome for most images on most sites.

Then keep it from rebuilding

Since the backlog reappears otherwise.

Add the description at upload, when you know what the image is and why you chose it, which takes about ten seconds.

Six months later nobody remembers which job that photograph was from, and the description becomes guesswork.

Where more than one person adds images, tell them, since this is a habit rather than a skill and nobody acquires it by accident.

One sentence in whatever passes for your process is enough to stop the backlog rebuilding.

A site that stays current costs nothing to maintain and one that does not needs another afternoon every two years.

Check what you wrote

Rather than assuming.

Run the checker again afterwards, which confirms the count has actually fallen.

Then read a few of your own descriptions aloud with the images hidden, which reveals the ones that say nothing useful.

A description reading photograph or image one is technically present and does nothing, and automated tools count it as a pass.

The tool checks that something is present and only a person can check whether it is useful.

Images inside PDFs are a separate job

Worth noting now so it does not derail the afternoon.

A checker crawling your site will flag images on web pages and will generally say nothing about the contents of a document you have linked to.

A price list, a brochure, or a specification sheet published as a document can be entirely unreadable and pass every automated check on the site itself.

Note which documents you publish and put them on a separate list rather than trying to deal with them now.

That is a different problem with a different answer, and mixing the two is how an afternoon becomes a month.

The counter-case

Automated counts overstate the problem.

A report showing a hundred and forty failures is mostly the same handful of template images counted repeatedly, which frightens people out of starting.

Some sites also have galleries of dozens of near-identical photographs where individual descriptions add very little.

And a site being rebuilt within the year should have this specified in the rebuild rather than done twice.

Put it in writing to whoever is building it, since it is far cheaper included than added afterwards.

Run a checker, sort into three piles, fix the templates first, and write only for the meaningful third.

The afternoon

1. Run a free checker.
2. Fix the template images first.
3. Sort the rest into three piles.
4. Mark decorative ones as a batch.
5. Write one line for the meaningful ones.
6. Replace images that are just text.
7. Add descriptions at upload from now on.

Step two is the one that changes the number fastest, since a single missing description on a logo is reported once per page and fixed once in total.

What happens when a site is mostly images is covered in a salon site built entirely in images.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.