Write your Black Friday alt text before the image pile lands

It's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The new homepage banner is live, forty product shots just came back from the photographer, and three more sale graphics are queued behind them. Every one of them has alt="" sitting empty, and the person who'd normally fill it in has eleven other things due today. Alt text is usually the first thing a deadline eats.

The fix isn't working faster during the rush. It's moving the work earlier, so there's less rush left to survive.

The pile starts weeks before the day itself

Black Friday reads like a single day, but the campaign behind it doesn't behave like one. Adobe's 2025 holiday tracking found that Black Friday itself brought in $11.8 billion in US online spending, up 9.1% year over year — but by the time Cyber Monday closed out the "Cyber Week" stretch, the season had already logged $137.4 billion since November 1. Retailers don't wait for the day to start publishing; the images pile up for weeks before it, and most of that pile lands on whoever runs the content calendar, not whoever runs the ad account.

That reframes the planning problem. It isn't "can we write alt text for Friday's post" — it's "can we keep pace with new images landing every day for a month."

Sort the pile before you write anything

Not every Black Friday image needs a paragraph. A gold countdown-timer graphic that repeats identically across ten emails is decorative — one accessible name is enough, or none at all if it sits next to text that already says the same thing. A product photo carrying its own information — color, material, what's actually in the box — is informative, and the person who can't see it needs a description that stands in for the click. W3C's WAI alt decision tree sorts most of this in under a minute per image, which matters when there are ninety of them in a queue. The decorative-vs-informative test is worth reading in full for the edge cases the tree doesn't spell out — like a sale badge sitting on top of a product photo, which is usually both.

Skipping it doesn't save the time you think it does

The instinct under deadline pressure is to leave the field blank and fix it later. Later tends not to arrive. Why alt text matters in the first place is that it's the only version of the image a screen reader user gets, and there's no grace period where that stops being true just because the post shipped in a hurry. WebAIM's most recent survey of screen reader users found that missing or improper alt text ranked sixth among the problems those users report most, ahead of most other page-level issues. A blank alt attribute on a product photo doesn't just look unfinished — it's a shopper who can't tell what the sale is on.

Product photos carry the highest stakes here, because they're doing double duty as the sales page itself. Writing alt text for product photos is worth a slower read once, so that on the day itself it's closer to instinct than research.

Build the habit before the pile lands

Two things make this survivable: writing alt text earlier, and writing it faster. Earlier means alt text in the calendar now, as a line item next to "schedule post" instead of a step someone remembers after the fact. Faster means not opening a separate tool for every image — a one-hotkey workflow that writes the description where you're already working keeps pace with a queue that refills every day in November instead of once a quarter.

None of this needs to be finished by October. It needs to be a habit by then — one queue at a time, so the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is just another Wednesday.