AI Alt Text Generator for Images – Bulk Alt Text & Accessibility Audit

Description

AI Alt Text Generator for Images writes descriptive, SEO-friendly alt text for
your WordPress images automatically. Instead of typing an alt tag for every image
by hand, you can generate alt text for one image, for a whole page, or for your
entire media library at once.

Missing alt text hurts twice. It locks out visitors who use screen readers, which
is an accessibility failure under WCAG, and it hides your images from Google Image
search. Most WordPress media libraries have hundreds of images with no alt text at
all, because writing them by hand is slow, repetitive work that nobody enjoys.

This plugin does that work for you.

Alt Text Audit

Scan your entire media library and get a health score for its alt text. The audit
flags every image with a problem:

• Missing alt text
• Empty alt attributes
• Duplicate alt text reused across images
• Alt text that is too long for screen readers
• Placeholder junk left behind by other tools

Every flagged image can be fixed right there: generate new alt text with AI, edit
it by hand, or mark it as decorative and ignore it. You can filter the list and
generate alt text for everything currently shown in one action.

Bulk Alt Text Generator

Process your whole media library in one run. The bulk generator works through
every image missing alt text in batches of 100, with a live progress counter
across the entire run, pause and resume, and a per-image log so you can see
exactly what was written and what failed. Before a large run starts, a
confirmation dialog tells you how many images will be processed.

Generate Alt Text Anywhere You Work

• Block editor – an AI Alt Text panel in the Content tab of the image block
• Media Library – a generate button right in the attachment details modal
• Bulk generator – for the whole library at once
• On upload – optionally generate alt text automatically for every new image
• REST API – an endpoint for external tools and your own automation

Works in Your Language

Unlike most alt text plugins, this one is not English-only. The admin screens, the
editor button and the notices are translated into Spanish (es_ES) and
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR).

The generated alt text follows your site’s language too, so a Spanish site gets
Spanish alt text and a Brazilian site gets Portuguese alt text, without any extra
configuration.

Bring Your Own AI

• On WordPress 7.0 and later, the plugin uses your site’s native AI Connectors
  configuration. No separate API key and no extra account needed.
• On WordPress 6.x, the plugin uses your own OpenAI API key. Generation is
  billed to you directly by OpenAI, at roughly $0.001 per image with gpt-4o-mini.

There is no subscription, no per-image fee and no account with us. The plugin is
free and you pay only your own AI provider, if anything.

Supported Image Formats

JPEG, PNG and WebP are analysed directly. AVIF images are converted to JPEG
automatically before analysis instead of being rejected.

Who This Is For

• Site owners with a large media library and no alt text
• Agencies and freelancers doing accessibility or SEO cleanups for clients
• Bloggers and photographers who publish a lot of images
• Anyone working toward WCAG accessibility compliance

External services

This plugin connects to the OpenAI API to generate alt text for your images. It is
required for AI generation on WordPress 6.x sites that do not have the native
WordPress 7.0 AI Connectors configured.

When you click “Generate” (in the block editor, the Media Library, or the Bulk
generator) or “Test Connection” on the settings page, the plugin sends the image
(as a base64 data URI) and a short text instruction to OpenAI’s Chat Completions
endpoint (https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions), authenticated with the API
key you configure. The “Test Connection” button sends only a minimal “Hi” message
with no image, to verify the key works. Nothing is sent unless you trigger one of
these actions.

This service is provided by OpenAI. By using the OpenAI path you agree to their terms:

• Terms of Use: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use
• Privacy Policy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy

On WordPress 7.0+ with AI Connectors configured, generation uses your site’s
configured AI provider through WordPress core instead, and this plugin makes no
direct external calls.

Development

The full, unminified source code — including the React/JavaScript sources under
src/ and the build tooling — is publicly available at:

https://github.com/internick2017/smart-alt-generator

Build the compiled assets in build/ with npm install && npm run build.