An open letter to CMS vendors

To the Product Teams,

The digital publishing landscape is currently undergoing a significant shift as accessibility compliance moves from a recommendation to a statutory requirement. With the enforcement of ADA Title II in the United States, the European Accessibility Act (EAA), and India’s IS 17802 standards, the burden on content creators to produce accessible content has never been greater. Yet, despite the sophistication of modern CMS platforms, the most common failure in web accessibility remains the absence of ALT text.

We believe that the solution to this persistent issue lies in bridging the gap between the image file and the publishing interface. We are currently advocating for mobile hardware vendors to implement ‘Alt at Source’ — a feature that embeds AI-generated and user-verified descriptions directly into an image’s IPTC AltTextAccessibility and XMP dc:description fields at the point of capture.

To complete this cycle of accessibility, we are calling on all major publishing platforms to integrate native support for these fields into their core media handling logic. At present, extracting ALT text from image metadata is often relegated to third-party plugins or manual entry. This creates unnecessary friction and, as a result, the requirement to add ALT text is typically ignored or overlooked by the average user. By implementing native extraction into your platform's core, you would allow the CMS to automatically detect metadata, auto-populate ALT fields, and ensure a single source of truth for an image’s description.

Democratising this capability — moving it from a specialised professional workflow to a default core feature — would dramatically improve the inclusivity of the web. It would empower SMEs and independent creators to meet global compliance standards effortlessly.

I am writing this not as a representative of a large corporation, but as an individual advocate who sees a significant gap in our digital infrastructure. I believe that by simply connecting the dots of existing technology, we can remove the friction that currently prevents a truly inclusive web. One person with a clear idea can highlight a path, but it requires the scale of your platform to turn that path into a standard for everyone. I encourage you to lead the way in adopting these industry-standard metadata schemas and look forward to a web that is accessible by design.

Kindera regards,

Simon Leadbetter, Founder at Kindera | #AltAtSource