Caroline Desrosiers is an accessibility advocate, speaker, writer, consultant, and founder of Scribely.
She’s also speaking at The Design + Accessibility Summit 2025, which takes place September 16–19 online, with a session on Optimizing Workflows for Better Alt Text.
We thought it would be fun to get to know her better with some Q&A.
Your session focuses on optimizing alt text workflows. What’s the key message you hope attendees take away from it?
The key message I want attendees to take away is that quality alt text depends on having strong processes, systems, and metadata management in place. Alt text is an essential content layer that reinforces your brand, enhances discoverability, and ensures your visuals are accessible to all users. Many teams struggle because their workflows, tools, and roles are not designed to handle accessibility or the complexity of managing image data and metadata effectively.
When teams centralize image data with context, map workflows across departments, and establish clear standards for quality descriptions, they unlock new image usage possibilities. This foundation allows them to use AI to assist with alt text, create personalization tools or AI assistants for images, and boost their visuals’ impact through SEO and AEO. Images have tremendous potential, and well-designed alt text workflows are essential to realizing it.
What inspired you to launch Scribely, and how did your background in publishing shape your approach to inclusive content?
When I worked in higher education textbook publishing, the industry was undergoing a huge shift from print to digital through a massive eBook conversion effort. I managed metadata and content distribution for these eBooks, giving me a front-row seat to how information moves across systems and the real challenges of keeping it consistent at scale. That experience helped me recognize the incredible power of metadata and the opportunities it creates for publishers.
My passion for accessibility grew when our team began addressing accessibility issues in the converted eBooks. I was surprised to learn that accessibility hadn’t been considered from the outset and that key metadata fields were missing or incomplete. This created a cycle of constant remediation for publishing teams and delayed access for students using assistive technologies, who often had to go through their universities just to request the accessible formats they needed.
That gap inspired me to launch Scribely, a resource designed for organizations managing image accessibility at scale. I chose to focus on alt text because it’s a fundamental accessibility need that still often falls through the cracks. Editorial, marketing, and production teams frequently feel unsure about who should own it. Through Scribely, I’ve learned that creating great alt text takes real collaboration across all those teams to truly succeed. I’ve been working to connect the dots ever since!
For teams that feel overwhelmed by alt text, what’s one mindset shift or practical step that can make the process more manageable?
The most important mindset shift is to stop publishing images without a clear plan for quality alt text. Every new image released without accessibility built in only makes the problem larger and more difficult to fix over time. Many organizations face a growing backlog because they continue adding content without changing their process.
The optimized approach is to establish two separate workflows. One ensures all future content includes alt text from the start by engaging designers, marketers, and product teams early. The other tackles the existing backlog through a phased plan that prioritizes based on context and impact. Relying solely on automation or trying to fix everything at once will not work without a clear strategy and human expertise.
Image description management should also be integrated into broader roadmaps and budgets because this work delivers tremendous value. Connecting alt text efforts to overall business priorities unlocks new possibilities and enables teams to invest in scalable systems that enhance both accessibility and the bottom line.
What’s a common misconception about alt text that you wish more people understood?
A common misconception is that any alt text is good enough, but true accessibility requires more than just filling in the alt attribute. A meaningful description must reflect the image’s purpose in context, which varies depending on where and how the image is used. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, yet we still see formulaic descriptions, file names used as alt text, repeated adjacent text, or alt text copied from a different context. These shortcuts fall short for users and fail to meet accessibility standards.
The path to scalable, high-quality alt text starts with understanding what makes a description useful. Once teams develop clear standards and organize their image data, they can begin incorporating technology solutions, like AI, more effectively and improving results over time. This process takes work and will look different for every organization, but when companies take ownership of the words behind their images, they unlock real value for both people and technology.
This article was last modified on September 8, 2025
This article was first published on August 7, 2025
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