Altmend – Find and Fix Image Alt Text

Description

Most alt text plugins generate text. Altmend is built around the harder half of the problem: making the fix actually land on the page.

Why that distinction matters

An image block is a static block. WordPress serves the markup stored in your post, not the alt text stored on the attachment. A plugin that only updates the attachment will show you a success message while your front end keeps serving alt="".

Altmend writes to all three places that matter:

1. The image block attributes, so the editor shows the right thing.
2. The <img> tag inside your post content — this is the one your visitors actually receive.
3. The attachment record, so future uses of the same image inherit it.

It never writes without your approval

This is a deliberate design decision, not a missing feature.

Across 39 images reviewed by hand, one class of error survived every prompt improvement we tried: the model would sometimes leave out something occupying a large part of the frame — buildings covering 25–30% of a photo, for example. There is no reliable automatic way to detect that omission, so a fully automatic mode would silently publish incomplete descriptions on your live site.

So Altmend suggests, flags its own uncertainty, and waits. You approve, edit, skip, or mark the image decorative, one image at a time.

Start with no API key and no cost

The first thing you get costs nothing and needs no account. Altmend scans the alt text you already have and flags the common problems: file names like DSC_01234.jpg, generic text like “image”, keyword stuffing, redundant openings such as “This is an image of”, markdown that leaked in from a paste, and text that is simply too long for a screen reader.

That scan runs entirely on your server. No API calls, no key, instant results in the Media Library.

Decorative images are your call, not the plugin’s

Whether an image should have an empty alt attribute depends on how you are using it, not on what the image contains. A marble texture used as a background should be empty; the same file used to illustrate a product’s material should not be. Altmend pre-selects an answer and asks you to confirm it.

What it does not do

• No overlay, toolbar or widget on your front end. Those do not fix the underlying markup.
• No “make my site accessible” claim. Content fixes are one part of accessibility, not all of it.
• No changes to your content without your approval.
• No colour-contrast or theme-level fixes. Those are code problems, and this plugin stays out of them.

Requirements

The image scanner in the editor works with the block editor, covering image, cover, media & text, and gallery blocks. Classic editor content is handled when the alt text is written back.

External services

The free audit does not contact any external service. It runs entirely on your server, and the plugin sends nothing anywhere unless you configure a provider and click a button.

AI suggestions are opt-in. To use them you supply your own API key for a service of your choice. Altmend ships with no provider configured and no keys of its own.

When you click “Suggest alt text” for an image, the plugin sends that single image, resized to a mid-size thumbnail, to the API endpoint you configured, together with the instruction prompt. Nothing else is transmitted: no post content, no other media, no user data, no site information, no telemetry. The request happens only on that click — there is no background scanning and no call-home behaviour.

The plugin author does not operate a proxy or relay and never receives your images, your key, or any data from your site.

Any OpenAI-compatible vision endpoint works. Examples of services you might choose, with their terms and privacy policies:

• OpenAI — https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use and https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
• Anthropic — https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms and https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
• Google (Gemini) — https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms and https://policies.google.com/privacy
• Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (DashScope) — https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/legal/latest/alibaba-cloud-international-website-product-terms-of-service and https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/legal/latest/privacy-policy

You are responsible for confirming that you are allowed to send your site’s images to whichever provider you choose.