Alt text as a deliverable: handing it off instead of hoping

The shoot wraps Thursday. Friday afternoon a link goes over with forty-two images named DSC_4471 through DSC_4512, a caption doc, and the usage rights. On Monday someone on the client side uploads them. Nobody wrote the image descriptions, and nobody was ever asked to.

The fix isn't a better reminder email — it's moving alt text from something you hope happens to something you ship. Name it in the scope, deliver it in the same file as the captions, and check it before the invoice goes out. That's not a novel idea; it's roughly what the US government tells its own agencies to do when outside partners produce content for them. Section508.gov's guidance is to put the accessibility requirement in the terms of the relationship up front, so partners know they owe accessible deliverables — and so anything inaccessible can be returned for remediation instead of quietly going live.

Why the handoff is where alt text dies

It dies because two people each assume the other has it. The agency figures the client's CMS will prompt for it. The client figures it came with the photos. Meanwhile the one person who knows why a particular frame was chosen — which is almost always the agency — isn't the person typing into the field. That's the same gap that makes describing images you didn't shoot so unsatisfying: you're guessing at intent that someone else already had.

What fills the gap, when anything does, is a placeholder. "Photo." "Image." The filename. W3C catalogs that as an outright failure — F30, text alternatives that aren't alternatives — and names exactly these cases: "spacer," "picture 1," "Chart.jpg." The field looks filled. It isn't.

What the deliverable actually looks like

Not a document. A column. Put the description next to the filename in whatever sheet already carries the captions and credits, so the person doing the upload can copy across without opening a second file or making a judgment call.

Two things make that column genuinely usable. First, cover the decorative images explicitly rather than leaving their cells blank — write "decorative, leave alt empty" so nobody invents a sentence to fill the void. Second, hand over a short note on the standard you're writing to: a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose, not a caption and not a transcript of what's in frame. Clients who've never seen that distinction tend to rewrite good alt text into marketing copy the moment they get it.

Put it in the scope, not the goodwill

One line in the statement of work does most of the work: alt text supplied for every delivered image, as an acceptance criterion. The reason it belongs in the contract rather than the kickoff call is money. Unscoped work is unbudgeted work, and unbudgeted work is what gets dropped when delivery day runs long. The federal acquisition guidance makes the same point from the buyer's side: leaving accessibility requirements out raises the risk of schedule and cost overruns, or remediation after the work has already been delivered and accepted.

Then make it repeatable. A house pattern recorded in your brand style guide keeps the rule alive through staff turnover on both sides, and a description step built into your content calendar catches images before they're in a zip file headed out the door. For the work already handed off, auditing a year of posts is a reasonable first retainer conversation — and a fair one, since what alt text is for doesn't change based on who was contractually responsible for it.