Image Alt Text Fully Automated Text Generation

Project Overview

An AI-driven automation tool that generates compliant, SEO-friendly alt text for all images uploaded to the company’s CMS. By embedding this into the editorial workflow, the system ensures ADA compliance and SEO best practices without adding work for busy editorial staff.

Business Challenge

Alt text is a legal requirement for accessibility and an important factor in SEO performance. However, editors often skipped the step, reused captions incorrectly, or provided inconsistent quality alt text due to time pressures. With over 15,000 new images uploaded each month, manual compliance was neither sustainable nor effective.

My Role

As Product Manager, I identified the inefficiency and compliance risk, led the exploration of AI-powered solutions, and guided the project from proof of concept through production rollout. I partnered with editorial stakeholders to validate output quality, secured adoption, and managed delivery with my development team.

Solution

We built an automated API service to seamlessly integrate with the CMS workflow:

• Image Upload Detection – Triggered when an editor uploads an image to the CMS.
  
  

• API Processing – CMS sends the image (in thumbor size) to the tool’s API.
  
  

• Celebrity Recognition – Amazon Rekognition analyzes the image for known celebrities with high confidence.
  
  

• AI Alt Text Generation – Image details (with celebrity context, if relevant) are passed to AI, which generates alt text following accessibility and SEO best practices.
  
  

• CMS Integration – The generated alt text is automatically returned and applied to the image in the CMS.
  
  

Business Impact

• • Eliminated the need for editors to manually create alt text for 15,000+ new images per month, saving 15,000 minutes (250 hours) monthly.
    
    

  • Enabled remediation of 600,000+ existing images in the CMS to ensure ADA compliance and SEO optimization.
    
    

  • Improved consistency and quality of alt text, strengthening accessibility compliance and SEO performance.
    
    

  • Freed editorial staff to focus on higher-value tasks instead of manual compliance work.
    
    

Technical Highlights

• 1. API-based architecture for seamless CMS integration.
     
     

  2. Amazon Rekognition for celebrity identification.
     
     

  3. AI-generated alt text tuned to accessibility and SEO best practices.
     
     

  4. Scalable solution supporting both new uploads and legacy image remediation.