Putting alt text in your brand style guide (so it survives staff turnover)

Most teams get alt text right for about eight months. Someone joins who cares about it. They describe every image, they quietly go back and fix the old ones, they nudge people in review. Then they take another job — and by the next quarter the field is empty again.

Nothing broke. The knowledge just left with the person, because it never lived anywhere except in their head. The fix is unglamorous: one page in the document your team already opens when they can't remember whether it's "email" or "e-mail."

Write decisions, not principles

"Alt text should be descriptive and meaningful" is not a rule. It's a wish. It gives a new hire nothing to act on and settles no argument in review. The entries that actually survive turnover read like decisions somebody already made:

Every image that carries information gets alt text. Purely decorative images get an empty alt attribute — nothing at all — so a screen reader skips them instead of announcing filler. Lead with the subject and skip "image of" or "photo of," since the screen reader already announces that it's an image. Aim for a single sentence of roughly 125 characters, unless the image is a chart, a screenshot, or dense with text, in which case say the takeaway and let it run longer. Linked logos describe where they go, not what they look like.

Each of those is short enough to remember and specific enough to enforce. Someone who has never thought about accessibility can follow them on their first Tuesday.

Add the parts only your team knows

Generic alt text advice is a search away. What isn't searchable is how your organization refers to its own things — and that's the part the style guide has to carry.

Write down the preferred spellings and shortenings for programs, products, and buildings, so an image of the same place doesn't get three names across three posts. Say whether people in public photos are named, and who signs off when they are. Note the platform quirks your team hits weekly: where the field hides in each tool, and the fact that limits differ — Instagram's field caps out around 100 characters, while Bluesky's allows up to 2,000 — so the same photo may need a short version and a long one.

Put it where the work happens

An entry nobody opens is the same as no entry. Link it from the publishing checklist, the social template, the CMS field help text — wherever the person is standing at the moment they need it. Two lines in the checklist ("alt text written? decorative images left blank?") do more than ten pages filed under Brand.

Then run the handoff test. Give the entry and five images to someone who has never written alt text — include a decorative one, a chart, and a photo with a person in it. If what comes back is publishable without edits, the entry works. If they ask you a question, the answer to that question is the next line you add.

Standards reduce arguing; tools reduce typing

A written standard fixes the "what should this say" problem. It doesn't fix the part where someone has to compose forty descriptions on a Friday afternoon. Those are two different bottlenecks, and teams that solve only the first one end up with a very well-documented empty field.

Pair the entry with a way to draft fast — then the house rules become a quick pass over a draft instead of a blank box at the worst moment of the week. That's the version that outlasts whoever wrote it.