DevLab Image Alt

Description

Images without alt text are bad for people who use screen readers and a missed chance for image search. DevLab Image Alt fills in the gaps automatically, at the moment the page is displayed. Your media library and your posts are not edited, so there is nothing to undo.

What it does

• Looks for images that have an empty or missing alt attribute and fills it in from the source you choose: the attachment title (default), the caption, the description, or the file name cleaned up (extension, size and duplicate-upload suffixes removed, hyphens and underscores turned into spaces, first letter capitalised when the name has no capital letters).
• Works on images printed by WordPress from the media library, such as featured images and most theme templates.
• Works on images inside your post and page content, when the image is a file from your media library.
• If the field you chose is empty for an image, it falls back to the cleaned-up file name. Long text is shortened to about 125 characters.
• It skips text that would say nothing, such as camera, phone and screenshot names (IMG_4032, IMG-20261024-WA0012, Screenshot 2026-10-24 at 3.20.11 PM, Captura de Tela 2026-10-24 às 15.20.11), hash file names or names with no real word, and leaves those images without alt text instead of adding noise.
• It respects images marked as decorative (role="presentation" or aria-hidden="true") and leaves their empty alt as it is.

What it does not do

• It never changes alt text that already has content.
• It does not edit the media library or your posts, and it does not run bulk jobs. Switch the plugin off (and clear your page cache) and your pages are exactly as they were.
• It does not touch images that come from other websites.
• Apart from the explicit markers above, it cannot tell a purely decorative image (where an empty alt is intentional) from a forgotten one, so it fills both. Alt text written by a person is always better than an automatic one.

Light and quiet

The plugin only filters output. It never writes alt text to your database: it stores one small settings option and, per user, a flag that remembers a dismissed notice. It does not touch .htaccess, does not store any cache, does not crawl your site and loads no file on your public pages. Only the <img> tags that need an alt are edited; the rest of your HTML is left exactly as it was.

For developers

Use the devlab_alt_text filter to change the text before it is used, or return an empty string to leave an image without alt text:

add_filter( 'devlab_alt_text', function ( $text, $attachment_id, $source ) { return $text; }, 10, 3 );

Privacy

This plugin collects no data, sends no data to anyone, contacts no external service and needs no account or API key. It does not set cookies. It does not provide legal advice and does not guarantee that your site meets any accessibility standard or law; it fills in one missing attribute.

About DevLab

DevLab builds plugins and themes for WordPress. The plugin adds a DevLab menu with its settings screen. That screen has a small box with a link to the DevLab Store (devlab.ia.br/store) and one dismissible notice. Nothing promotional is added anywhere else in your dashboard or to your public pages (the only change there is the missing alt attribute), and the plugin never adds a credit link to your site.