In the EU it will shortly be a requirement for public sector websites to have alt text for uploaded images. My organisation’s users are rubbish at adding alt text, however, and I’m trying to find a way to force them to do so.
The only way I’ve come across so far is to automatically fill the alt text with the image’s title – which is not great if an image is called “shutterstock_45363627” – and could encourage laziness.
Ways I can think of making them type something:
(1) Set the ‘Alt text’ field to ‘required’ through the functions.php file – (though I read default fields can’t be changed through attachment_fields_to_edit, for example).
(2) Find the “Attachment details” file in wp-admin and add a “required” attribute to the field. Which is awful, but might work.
(3) Use a WordPress hook to check that the alt text is filled in when setting an image… Or check that the alt text contains a space, since it should be a couple of words.
However, despite hours of googling, I can’t find anything online on how to do any of these. Does anyone have suggestions?