WordPress 7.0 was released last week, including many updates across the entire product, including integration with AI engines. But the new feature that we are most excited about is native support for IPTC’s Alt Text (Accessibility) property.

Added to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard in 2021, the Alt Text (Accessibility) property, along with its sibling Extended Description (Accessibility), were added to enable alt text accessibility metadata to travel along with image files as they move through content creation and production workflows.

Image editing and management tools have supported the properties for several years: Photo Mechanic from CameraBits added support in 2022, Adobe Creative Cloud apps in December 2023. Fotoware, MediaGraph and many other Digital Asset Management and image editing tools also support the property.

WordPress support for the property now completes the chain: image editors and photo library managers can add alt text to images in their DAM or image editing software, and the embedded alt text will automatically be picked up by WordPress to be embedded in HTML image tags on published web pages, with no extra work required.

While this makes many workflows much easier, the IPTC recommends that site editors view the alt text extracted from the image to ensure that it is relevant for the context in which the image is published. Alt text embedded in an image may not reflect the reason why the image was attached to a particular story or post, so we caution against using it without a quick check for context.

While alt text is of course crucial for accessibility support, with native support in screen readers used by visually impaired people, it can also be an important signal to search engines and to AI systems to help to describe images.

IPTC and the Photo Metadata Working Group would like to thank the WordPress Core development team for integrating the new feature, and also Caroline Desrosiers of Scribely who initially championed the idea of adding alt text as a core IPTC embedded metadata property. Caroline’s persistence and dedication has finally paid off in the world’s most used content management system now offering native support for the property.

WordPress VIP, the version of WordPress tailored for large publishers, recently joined IPTC as an Associate Member, and we are very happy to have contributed to this work.

The following resources offer more information on this topic:

• IPTC’s work on metadata for Accessibility and Diversity
• Videos of the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference, which had a focus on the topic of accessibility
• IPTC Video Metadata Hub, a sister standard to IPTC Photo Metadata using many of the same properties, added support for the Alt Text (Accessibility) and Extended Description (Accessibility) properties in December 2022.
• Photo Mechanic from CameraBits, another IPTC member organisation, offers features for those managing large image archives who need to update alt text in bulk. They are described in this recent news post.