Calling an image "image" is not accessibility

For a student using a screen reader, alt text is the image. When it says "image", "graphic" or a file name, a chart that explains a deadline becomes silence, and a screenshot showing which button to press in a portal becomes a guess. The page looks finished to the team that built it; the student gets an incomplete version of it.

What good alt text does

• Describes what the image communicates in context, not just what it depicts.
• Is empty (alt="") for purely decorative images, so screen readers skip them instead of announcing noise.
• Summarizes the takeaway of a chart or diagram, with the underlying data available as text or a table nearby.
• Reads out any text that appears inside the image.
• Stays short — longer explanations belong in the page body or a caption.

Where weak alt text hides

Placeholder alt text is rarely a deliberate choice. It comes from CMS fields that accept anything, bulk uploads, images reused across pages where the context has changed, and content in the LMS and PDFs that never went through the website's review. Automated scanners flag missing alt text, but they cannot tell whether existing alt text is meaningful.

A quick audit

Start with your homepage, then your ten most-visited student-facing pages. Turn on a screen reader, or inspect each image, and ask one question: if this image disappeared, would the alt text give a student the same information? Fix the ones that fail, then add alt-text guidance to the CMS and the content team's publishing checklist so new pages do not reintroduce the problem.

Next step

Tell us which pages your students rely on most and we'll help you review the images on them, and set up guidance so content teams get it right at publish time.