I had a call last month with someone running digital communications at a mid-sized state university. Sharp team, good budget. They'd just wrapped a full site redesign — new CMS, reworked IA, the works.

Then the accessibility audit landed.

"Everything passed except images," she said. Roughly 40,000 of them across admissions, athletics, academics, and research had missing or garbage alt text. Forty thousand.

I wish I could say that was unusual. It's not. We hear some version of this story almost every week.

Universities publish an absurd volume of images. Campus photography, faculty headshots, research figures, event coverage, athletics, student life, course thumbnails, department banners — the list goes on. And every semester, thousands more get added by dozens of different teams on different platforms with zero shared process for how images get described. Nobody's coordinating this stuff.

So the gap just grows. It compounds every semester until somebody — an auditor, a student filing a complaint, an accreditation reviewer — finally notices.

Why this is a bigger deal than most schools think

Here's what's actually on the line.

The legal exposure risk

If your institution takes federal funding — and almost all of them do — Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act says your digital content needs to be accessible. WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard everyone points to now, Section 508 included.

Alt text isn't some nice-to-have that auditors glance at. It's one of the first things the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights check when they get a complaint.

And complaints are trending up. Over the last couple years, we've watched multiple well-known universities get hit with OCR resolution agreements — basically a mandate to fix accessibility across their entire web presence. The pattern is always the same. Someone with a visual impairment files a complaint. The school gets caught flat-footed. Then they're spending six figures on emergency remediation that could've been prevented.

The real question isn't whether you have alt text gaps. It's how bad the problem is — and whether you'd rather find out on your own terms or someone else's.

It's also an accreditation issue

This one flies under the radar. Accrediting bodies have started looking at digital accessibility as part of their evaluations — it falls under the broader umbrella of digital equity and student success. Schools that can show they're handling this proactively look a lot better than ones scrambling after a complaint. It's becoming table stakes for what "good governance" means.

And yes, it affects SEO

Your prospective students and their parents are Googling you. Researchers checking out your faculty pages are Googling you. Journalists looking for campus photos are Googling you. And when those images don't have alt text, Google has nothing to work with. They might as well not exist.

Campus tour photos, program pages, research visuals, housing, facilities — all stuff people actively search for. Without alt text on those images, you're just not showing up where you could be.

Proper alt text gets your images into Google Image Search and makes the pages they're on rank better for relevant queries. On admissions and program marketing pages especially, that's not abstract — it feeds directly into your enrollment funnel.

What makes EDU different than other institutions

When we talk to ecommerce or SaaS marketing teams, the alt text conversation is pretty straightforward — it's about SEO and conversion. Universities are messier.

Everyone has a stake, nobody wants ownership. Accessibility wants Section 508 compliance. The web team is watching WCAG scores. Communications is worried about SEO and brand. The provost's office has accreditation on the brain. IT wants whatever creates the fewest tickets. All valid concerns — but the result is that alt text ends up being everyone's problem and nobody's responsibility.

Decentralization is the default. A mid-sized university might have 50+ departmental websites, plus the main institutional site, athletics, alumni, admissions, a research portal — all managed by different people, sometimes on entirely different platforms. Try enforcing a content standard across that. It's brutal.

The people publishing images have other jobs. It's a faculty member updating their lab page between classes. A work-study student dumping athletics photos into a gallery. An admin assistant adding headshots to a staff directory because someone asked them to. Alt text isn't on any of their radar, and it's unreasonable to expect it to be.

The backlog never stops growing. Every campus event, research publication, new hire, and semester of course materials dumps more images into the pile. Trying to keep up manually doesn't just get harder over time — at a certain scale, it's just not possible.

How leading institutions are solving this

We work with a lot of universities — Yale, Michigan, Boston College, Northeastern, University of Georgia, UC Humanities Research Institute, Harvard, University of Edinburgh, University of Melbourne, Auburn, Ringling College of Art and Design, and more. They all use AltText.ai to handle image accessibility across their web properties.

What they have in common isn't size or CMS choice. It's that they stopped treating alt text as a manual content task and started treating it as infrastructure.

1. Automate at the point of upload

The best time to add alt text is the moment an image enters the system. When that happens automatically — image gets uploaded, alt text gets generated, editor reviews and publishes — there's no backlog to manage. It's just part of the workflow.

That's what our CMS integrations and API do. You connect once, and from that point on, every image that hits your system gets a description. No extra steps for your editors, no training sessions, no reminder emails nobody reads.

2. Run a bulk pass on your backlog

Of course, most schools aren't starting from zero. They've got years of images sitting in their CMS with blank alt attributes.

Bulk generation handles that. One of our customers had 291,000 images — we processed all of them. A content team doing that manually? Months, maybe longer. With bulk generation it was done in days. For schools facing an upcoming audit or trying to check a box on an accessibility roadmap, nothing else gets you there as fast.

3. Give decentralized teams a consistent standard without adding work

We hear this constantly from EDU customers: "We can't force accessibility standards on 50 department sites because we have no enforcement mechanism." And they're right — every department runs its own show.

Automation just sidesteps the whole thing. Doesn't matter who uploaded the image or what system they used — it gets a description either way. No policy document needed. The standard lives in the tool, not in a PDF nobody reads.

And if you care about brand voice (some schools really do), we support custom prompts. A research-focused R1 and a small liberal arts college will get descriptions that read differently — because they should.

4. Don't forget about other languages

If your school recruits internationally or runs programs in other languages, those pages need alt text too. We handle 130+ languages — so whether it's a French admissions page or a Mandarin research portal, the images get described properly without anyone translating anything manually.

What good alt text actually looks like

Most universities that "have" alt text actually have junk alt text. There's a massive difference between checking a box and writing something a screen reader user would actually find helpful. Some examples from the kinds of images we see on EDU sites constantly:

Campus tour photo

• Bad: "campus photo"
• Worse: "IMG_4892.jpg" (we see this constantly)
• Useful: "Students walk along a tree-lined path between brick academic buildings on a sunny autumn afternoon"

Faculty headshot

• Bad: "professor"
• Useful: "Dr. Sarah Chen, Associate Professor of Environmental Biology, smiling in front of a laboratory setting"

Research figure

• Bad: "graph"
• Useful: "Bar chart showing a 34% increase in carbon sequestration rates across three forest types from 2018 to 2023"

Game day action shot

• Bad: "basketball game"
• Useful: "A Michigan Wolverines guard drives to the basket during a Big Ten home game at the Crisler Center"

A decorative banner at the top of a page

• Bad: "blue banner image"
• Actually correct: empty alt attribute (alt="") — screen readers should skip decorative images entirely

That last one trips people up. WCAG says decorative images need an empty alt attribute — not a description, not "decorative image," just alt="". Knowing which images are decorative and which need real descriptions is a classification problem. AltText.ai handles that automatically.

The SEO angle

Here's what this actually costs you in search.

Prospective students Google you before they visit. Parents Google you before they write a tuition check. Researchers, journalists, and faculty candidates — same thing. Google can't do anything with an image that has no text description attached to it. It's a blank.

A university with 40,000 images on its site? That's 40,000 things Google could be indexing and surfacing in image results, regular SERPs, AI overviews. Or it's 40,000 blanks. Depends on whether those images have alt text.

We've seen schools run bulk remediation passes and report noticeable bumps in organic image traffic within a couple months. It's not the only thing you should do for SEO, but it might be the lowest-effort, highest-signal fix available to most university web teams right now.

The practical path forward

If you're running web, accessibility, or communications at a university, here's where we'd start:

Run a free audit first. Our Website Accessibility Analyzer crawls your site and gives you a count — how many images are missing alt text, which pages are worst, where the biggest gaps are. Takes maybe five minutes, and you'll have actual numbers instead of guesses. That alone is usually enough to get budget approval or move the project up the priority list.

Deal with the backlog. Bulk generation lets you process your whole existing image library at once. You go from "we have a problem" to "we have a defensible baseline" in days, not months. If there's an audit coming, this is how you get ready for it.

Automate going forward. Hook AltText.ai into your CMS or DAM so every new image gets a description automatically. That way the backlog doesn't grow back.

Don't change how your teams work. You don't need to retrain departmental editors or bolt on another step to anyone's publishing process. If the alt text happens automatically, there's nothing to enforce.

A note on cost

We work with everything from big R1 research universities to community colleges watching every dollar. Pricing scales accordingly:

A small school can start at $29/month. Most mid-sized universities end up on our Platinum plan — that's $229/month for 10,000 images (or $2,199 if you pay annually, which most do). Larger systems with multiple campuses usually want a custom deal where they pool credits across domains. At that volume the per-image cost drops to about a penny.

If you're working within a tight budget cycle, the annual plan front-loads all your credits at once. That makes it easy to run a big remediation sprint at the start of the academic year and use whatever's left for ongoing automation through the rest of it.

Happy to talk through what makes sense for your situation specifically — reach out at rob@alttext.ai.

The bottom line

Look, every university has this problem. The backlog is there, it's getting bigger, and the legal and SEO downsides of ignoring it are only going to get worse.

The fix isn't a massive internal project. It's not a new hire. Yale, Michigan, Northeastern, Harvard — they all got to the other side of this by automating it. No more asking people to manually describe images. Just make the descriptions happen in the background and move on to problems that actually require human judgment.

Your accessibility auditor will notice the difference. So will your students.