The Outer Circle

Caroline Desrosiers – Scribely – Alt Text, Metadata, and the Power of Words

• Silktide • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Caroline Desrosiers, founder of Scribely, talks with Jessica about making content truly inclusive – from alt text that tells the right story to the metadata standards that help it travel.

With clients like Sesame Street and features in the New York Times, Caroline brings both warmth and precision to a topic many still get wrong.

From AI descriptions to the real cost of exclusion, this episode is about language, leadership, and what it means to be seen.

[Introduction, Jessica voice over] 
Welcome to the Outer Circle, a podcast about digital accessibility, what it is, why it matters, and the people working to make the web a better place for everyone. 

I'm Jessica Chambers, accessibility evangelist at Silktide, and each episode, I sit down with someone in the field to hear their insights, experiences, and challenges.

Let’s see where today takes us.

[Conversation begins]

[Jessica] 
Today I'm joined by Caroline Desrosiers, founder of Scribely, a company on a mission to make visual and multimedia content accessible to everyone. Caroline's work has been featured in The New York Times and Fast Company, and she shared her insights at major conferences like CSUN, Site Tech Global, and South By Southwest. She's consulted for Amazon, Sesame Street, and the Smithsonian, and played a key role in improving how accessibility metadata is handled in image standards through her work with the IPTC and W3C.

See how good you sound? It's just like, damn!

[Both laugh]

[Jessica] 
I'm so happy you're here, Caroline.

[Caroline] 
I'm so happy to be here and excited about this podcast.

[Jessica] 
Yay. So, question we start always, can
you tell us a bit about yourself and your work in digital accessibility?

[Caroline] 
I was born and raised in Southern California. I still live in California, but up in Lake Tahoe. I love the outdoors, all sorts of activities, and my background is mostly in book publishing, actually. Before I started Scribely, I worked for a textbook publisher and learned a ton about digital publishing, about metadata, and I'm still pulling what I learned from those early days into my work in accessibility.

Let's see. I definitely have anxiety. I have a skin condition called vitiligo. I'm definitely an open book; you can ask me anything. And I just love working in accessibility. I'm quite passionate about image descriptions and really focused on the media accessibility requirements and making sure that they are absolutely the same quality as the rest of the content that's published on the web.

[Jessica] 
What was your aha moment that started you down the accessibility path?

[Caroline] 
Yes, so when I was working in book publishing, my role was to make sure that all of the digital book files and their associated metadata was distributed out to the online retail marketplace. So think anywhere selling eBooks on the web. And that gave me an interesting vantage point into workflows, into the process of creating digital files.

And I was working in book publishing right during this time where they were making this transition from print to digital and digitizing everything, right? It was a massive project. And then digitizing in multiple formats, PDF, ePub 2, ePub 3, interactive eBooks, very exciting time where everything was going digital and we were seeing those digital sales increase.

So it was really fascinating work. And eventually the conversation turned to, well, how do we make all of these eBooks that we digitized accessible?

That was my aha moment because I said, wait, explain that to me again. We just did all this work and it's not accessible? Wow, my brain is completely broken and yes, I'd like to join your accessibility working group. Let's talk about this.

And then just became endlessly frustrated and fascinated with the problems and the solutions associated with the work that I was doing. And I just reached a point where I thought, I am so passionate about solving these problems, I've gotta get in there and I really want to work in accessibility.

So that's when I left book publishing and started working in accessibility. Yeah.

[Jessica] 
Oh wow. You really had that whole like, there's a reason we have shift left, right? Because you're like,

[Caroline] 
Oh yeah.

[Jessica] 
You can't wait till the end. Like...

[Caroline] 
Absolutely.

[Jessica] 
We didn't do that? No one considered that?

So how did you go from there to founding your own company?

[Caroline] 
I always had an interest in starting a business. It was kind of a running joke between me and my now husband where I would just invent silly little business ideas just for fun in my head. And I had a note in my phone with just all these business ideas and names or whatever, and it became kind of like a funny thing. But I think that's because it was kind of in the back of my head that I would really like to start a business.

My personality when I worked in book publishing, it feels very different than it is today. I was shy. I really liked behind the scenes work. I wasn't sure about working on a team. I was like, just give me a project where I can like quietly work for hours on it. I guess I was, you know, unsure of how that would translate.

But when I was so passionate, I found myself being so, so passionate about solving image description
problems, all of that kind of went out the window and I thought, I can get around these little things with my personality and these little nerves that I have and insecurities. And in fact I want to, in fact, I think it's worth it. And so I kind of put myself to the test.

And when I started Scribely, it was January, 2020. So.

[Jessica] 
No way. [Jessica laughs] That was some timing. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
It was some timing. So, if you remember January, 2020, everyone was very excited about the 2020s and had some pretty grand plans for what they were going to do that year. And so did I, right? I announced my business on January 15th, 2020, and I was ready to go. I was gonna go to all the conferences, I was gonna talk to people. I had a new website, excited about my logo, and I was ready to go.

And then...

[Jessica] 
And no sourdough starters in that plan.

[Caroline laughs]

[Caroline] 
Yeah. But then of course, you know, a few months later, everything changes. And that was, that... I was nervous. I, I didn't know it was gonna happen. Nobody knew it was gonna happen. And to have a new business that nobody knew anything about. And also I felt new to accessibility. Nobody knew me. What am I going to do?

And so, in starting Scribely, I forced myself to get better at social media because we're at a distance and we need to do that. And I force myself to do public speaking to get myself out there as much as possible at these virtual conferences.

So early days of Scribely looked like... Wow, okay, this first year is not gonna work out as I thought. And, we may need to shift it up, but I think what I learned is that it's very important to be flexible and agile in having a business and make sure that it absolutely lines up with where we're heading next. So I think some good lessons learned ultimately in that first year.

[Jessica] 
It sounds like you have imposter syndrome like so many of us do. Do you have any recommendations for how we deal with that? Do you have like, your top things you do when you're feeling that like, you know, what am I doing here?

[Caroline] 
Yeah. Imposter syndrome is very real. I still feel it today because we don't stop encountering challenges in our work or attempting to level up. Right? So I think that it's something that we continue to experience, maybe not as in an extreme way as the very beginning and starting out and feeling very intimidated by all of that. But I always lean on, I've gotten through this before, and...

[Jessica] 
Ooh.

[Caroline] 
I can get through it again and I can put myself in uncomfortable places and find my way through it because I watched myself do that before. Imposter syndrome, yes, I have experienced it many times. I would also really advocate for developing deep knowledge and expertise in areas that you're interested in and reading a lot about the body of work that other people have that you are really inspired by, that you are really passionate about. And the more that you educate yourself and you become an expert in areas that you really care about, I think, then it shines through. You eventually start to feel like you belong and you can help and you can make some contributions to developing these solutions.

So I think just being authentic to yourself and how you think you can best contribute to solving a problem that creates a sense of belonging in yourself and in a space.

[Jessica] 
That was amazing.

What is your top tip for someone who is new to accessibility?

[Caroline] 
I think that it's remembering that this work is absolutely about humans.

It's about users understanding how different people navigate the web and what they need to access information, which is so, so important. And it's also about the humans that work in accessibility and that have spent years studying a problem or advocating for accessibility, for disability rights, and learning from them. And recognizing what you as an individual can contribute. I just think there's so much humanity in this work. And I know we're gonna talk a lot about tech, but that's my top tip is to really see people, and to discover kind of the nuance, of course. And that there's not always a straight up, easy answer for everything. In fact, "it's complicated," would be the answer quite often. And that's okay.

[Jessica] 
Yeah, I think the humanity angle is actually one of the most important things. I think we lose sight of that a lot, right? It's very easy to just get bogged down in like, these are the rules, these are the standards. And I say often, like, you can line up five accessibility professionals and get seven opinions. And I am guilty of this, right? Like, the answer I give to so many things is, it depends, right? Because it's like, well, you know.

And yesterday someone told me that Gareth Ford Williams had said to them, you need to decide who you want to exclude. And they were like taken aback.

[Caroline] 
Interesting.

[Jessica] 
But he said that even if you think about like a movie, if you go like, okay, this is an R-rated movie, you're now excluding children. That's a decision you made. You know? And by kind of reframing, my favorite thing ever, "reframing," you can see how like you are making decisions even if you're not aware of it, you know? And it's probably impossible to really make something that works perfectly for everyone, you know? But in your attempts to get there, we'll get that progress over perfection thing.

But ask yourself if you are prepared to say, these are the people we're excluding, right? And we're okay with that. And I was kinda like, yes, exclusion is a choice, you know?

[Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
Yeah. Gareth is speaking to awareness of your decisions and how they impact others. And if you have excluded a group of people, why? Questioning yourself, and is there something that we can do to change that? Is there a decision that we can make in the room right now? Did we not give our ourselves enough budget for this project? Can we learn from that and increase the budget next time? Are we out of time,

[Jessica] 
That.

[Caroline] 
because we didn't we didn't plan accordingly for how much actual work this was going to take? Learning from your mistakes and planning not to do them next time when they result in exclusion is very important. Yeah. So I love that. That's a great point.

[Jessica] 
Yeah, I like talking to people and finding out some of them care about accessibility in ways you didn't know they did. 'cause they're like, oh, you're an accessibility person! Like, I love it. I wish they would all just come up to me and tell me their stories and tell me their aha moments. 'cause like, I just want to know. Everybody tell me yours.

We haven't talked about this. Do you have any pets?

[Caroline] 
Yes,

[Jessica] 
Yes!

[Caroline] 
I have a 1-year-old, still gonna call her kitten, named Freya, and she is so fun and so adorable. Ball of energy. First time in life I've experienced kitten energy which has been really fun. She is what they call, I discovered on Reddit, a Tuxe Tortico. So she's a tuxedo cat. She's calico colored. And she's technically tortoise shell, so she is a complex description, very interesting face that's half orange, half black, and then she has kind of this pinwheel pattern around her mouth.

[Jessica] 
Wow.

[Caroline] 
She actually has four different colors around her mouth in that exact pinwheel pattern or checkerboard pattern. So she's so, so interesting and that's why we were drawn to her and she just fills all my moments with joy whenever she runs past me. And yeah, talk about authenticity, like when you're trying to take yourself seriously, working from home on some big meeting and then your cat comes in and just does something truly strange in the background. It brings you back down to earth.

[Caroline laughs]

[Jessica] 
This is my life. [Both laugh] Yes. I am a cat slave. [Both laugh] Yes. I accepted that many years ago.

So she has tortitude.

[Caroline] 
Oh, she has tortitude in droves. Man, like you have to play with her. Or else she will tear apart the curtains
and climb furniture and jump off things. And yeah, you have to play for her own safety and for your home not looking like everything is destroyed.

[Caroline laughs]

[Jessica] 
See folks, this is why I say kittens, dogs, and children: awesome when they're somebody else's so you can play with them and give them back.

[Caroline laughs]

[Jessica] 
What's a common accessibility mistake you run across?

[Caroline] 
I think that a common mistake in accessibility is to leave everything to the end. And really, finding yourself without options, without time to really do a good job that you would be proud of publishing. A lot of the content that we see published on the web, it's kind of like when you look behind the scenes and you look, or you look at the accessibility you experience on a screen reader, you're like, how did it get to here? And how have we not fixed this yet? This is just... bad. And when I look at, you know, what you've just released in this webpage, it looks like you were trying to do a good job and... what happened, right?

[Jessica] 
That.

[Caroline] 
And I think that oftentimes the mistake is you saved it until the very last minute and it shows. So I would say if we could just get organizations over that thinking that it's at the end and show them, yes, we are using this, this phrase shift left. But what does that mean from a practical standpoint for your workflow, for the teams you work with? You actually need to trace it back to where did this mistake start and how can I fix it along the way.

So, I think that a lot of accessibility errors can just be solved by thinking about it a little earlier on in your process.

[Jessica] 
I say do it right or do it twice, which is my shortened form of the, if you think you can't afford to do it right,
you really can't afford to do it twice.

[Caroline] 
That's perfect and absolutely right.

[Jessica] 
Every time they're like, but it costs, and I'm like, inaccessibility costs you so much more and in ways you probably haven't realized. I had a conversation with someone who said that we talked to web managers and we're talking to the wrong people. He said, you need the channel managers. Right? Because your inaccessible website causes someone to pick up the phone. He was like, they need to talk about how many irate customers pick up the phone.

[Caroline] 
Ooh.

[Jessica] 
Then you need to talk to them about how many of them give up while they're waiting in the queue 'cause there's too many people calling. And then ask them about how many sick days their employees take due to the stress of the angry customers calling in. He was like, and get them to look at that because the problem is the silos. So the web team makes an inaccessible website or a PDF that can't be used, right? And people get mad and they call in, but the call team, you know, in the answering phone center is a different department and they don't talk to each other. And no one's realizing that like your choices in web are impacting the org in all these other places, and no one's joining the dots to be like, actually you need to see the big picture.

Your website is your front door, you know? And if people can't use it, they're gonna go away. Or worse, they're gonna call you and be mad. And could have headed all of that off. Right? You know, but the web team's like, this is my budget, you know? And you're like, yeah, but that impact over there is costing us potentially millions, you know, and we're not tracing it. It's wild to me.

So, if you could add something to WCAG, what would it be?

[Caroline] 
There is a lot of confusion around when an extended description is needed. AKA, a long description. And we talk a lot about alt text, but we kind of leave out this part about an extended description. I don't know, maybe we're trying not to see that that requirement is there. But this is... This is a real challenge because for the folks that are building tools, building platforms, building experiences, not creating an easy way to add an extended description to that experience because of confusion about that specific requirement, and then also just questions around like, well, if there's an extended description and an endless number of characters to fully describe an image...  How long should alt text be?

And it's just something that I feel like, even though there is a page on complex images with tips on all of the different ways that you can support linking out to an extended description, I think that what I'm seeing in the field is that there's confusion on this and we need to perhaps provide more guidance.

And also, when are we talking about an extended description? I know that we can't... Talking about character count is a tricky one because with different languages of course the same sentence can be, you know, different characters. So that's a real challenge to define it in terms of characters. But I think that does also confuse people where if they don't know the length of alt text, then they don't know when they need an extended description. So I would say alt text should be long enough. Generally one to two sentences, but long enough to get your point across.

And if you have an extended description, and if you know you need one, your alt text kind of becomes this trailer or this preview to the extended description, it should give you enough information for users to decide whether they need to click on that link and find out more. Right? It shouldn't be so short that you are uninterested about the details or you don't think that there's anything more to it.

So anyways, I just think that that's... We could do more work there. We're not seeing enough extended descriptions on the web, so that's probably an indication that we need to update the guidance.

[Jessica] 
I rarely see them,

[Caroline] 
Yeah.

[Jessica] 
and there are definitely some images where I'm like, we need a lot more than this.

[Caroline] 
Yes.

[Jessica] 
If you could remove something from WCAG, what would that be?

[Caroline] 
So I have trouble with decorative images and I know that we need to... I know that we need to call images decorative, but I can't tell you how difficult it's been to get people over this thinking of, when is an image decorative or calling too many images decorative on a page that are not decorative. And that's that kind of, that nuance we were talking about where, how are you supposed to know, right?

And it depends absolutely on context and author intent and all of that. And you're like, oh, okay, so now I'm a mind reader. Now I'm trying to figure out what this author intended in order to determine whether this image was decorative. And it just has added so much complexity. I know we need decorative images. There's also just a problem of calling them out as, how do you know, when an organization or an individual who has published that image to the web, how do you know they've marked it as decorative or whether they've missed an alt text description? Which happens a lot, a lot where alt text is just missed.

So, I think that one, you know, maybe we should have called it something else, or there should have been a
very intentional way of tagging what is a decorative image rather than just leaving the alt attribute blank. So I don't know. That's my, that's my kind of pet peeve.

[Caroline laughs]

[Jessica] 
I have actually encountered a website where the alt text was, "Decorative."

[Caroline] 
Oh,

[Jessica] 
It says "Decorative."

[Caroline] 
Oh, dear.

[Jessica] 
Image: Decorative. And it was everywhere.

[Caroline] 
In some ways, I'm like, thank you for actually saying that you looked at this image and you called it decorative. Otherwise I wouldn't have known that. But also annoying. Annoying.

[Jessica] 
I was dying. Yeah, that, it still makes me laugh. 

What are your thoughts on the impact AI could have on digital accessibility?

[Caroline] 
When it comes to AI, I think that we need to remember that this is a new emerging technology, I guess not new, but disruptive technology that's changing everything. And we're seeing that organizations building technology are moving quite fast and perhaps recklessly breaking things in order to get there first. That personally makes me nervous for the web and for the accessibility of the web because we've seen that happen before and just rushing through something, you're likely to forget accessibility. And maybe you won't, but like I am personally worried about that.

I think that AI in a way is challenging like how much we have to do in a day, truly, to keep with this level of productivity because now the assumption is that you can use AI. So I'm not happy about adding more work to people's days to try to figure this out. Also worried for quality and artists out there in terms of their copyrighted works or their developed expertise and skill in an area kind of being wiped out by speed and efficiency. 

Also, AI adds so much potential of solving accessibility barriers. So it's just, it's just so complicated. The way I feel about it is, I'm so excited by tools that are put in the hands of assistive technology users that involve AI that are totally game changing for their day. And I'm such a fan of that, where users are given these tools that they can choose to deploy if they want to, and really like in a moment where they would've had to ask for help, they can be independent. I absolutely love that application of AI. I think that there's a difference between a user tool and then a content tool and how you're applying AI to the development of content and publishing that content on the web.

I don't think that the existence of AI is an excuse to publish inaccessible content on the web, and it hasn't changed anything in terms of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and anything that you really are required to do. 

I make a point out of saying accessibility requirements, these are not features. They are requirements, and AI hasn't changed that. So if your use of AI is resulting in inaccessible images or bad quality alt text that's non-descriptive then you need to take a look at that workflow and find out where you need to add human intervention because it is not an excuse to create access barriers.

[Jessica] 
I know you all can't see me, but I am like cheering. [Jessica laughs] I love the idea of what Apple was doing, where like you could hit a key command and it would automatically generate alt text if there wasn't any. So like that FOMO thing, which I feel, you know, like that you'd have an option, right? Like if there isn't any, describe it for me anyway, because I don't trust the author. That's valid. But like, that to me is the better solution than people being like, well, just autogenerate.

Uh, right. What are your thoughts on overlays if you are prepared to share them? I am aware it's a bit of a minefield.

[Caroline] 
Yes. So I have a lot of issues with overlays, of course. My big one is that it drives down the perception of what accessibility work should cost. And it also, for the businesses that have signed up to pay a monthly subscription, there are sunk costs associated with that because, however many months you've been paying for an overlay on your website, when you remove that line of code, you go back to square one. So it's kind of this like... the sunk costs keep you in? And that business model feels like you're forcing businesses into going this way. This path they've set out on and trusting that, you know, it's going to get better and what they'd spent up until that point had value or it was just going somewhere.

So I'm gonna call out the business impact and the impact on true accessibility experts and vendors that are working to not giving you an answer that you want to hear, but giving you the answer based on their expertise, which is that it depends, it's complicated. I can help you get there. I think that doing it right the first time and fixing the actual issue is sustainable. That's sustainability. Because you are making improvements that stick that will last. So this kind of temporary, you know, bandaid approach is just so disappointing in general. I think focusing on fixing the root cause of the problem, fixing your workflow, truly understanding and maybe letting those accessibility barriers just exist for a bit if they are driving you to change them. Right? And actually making the content better in terms of accessibility over time. That's always what I would advocate for rather than an overlay solution that I think may encourage businesses to just stop thinking about this.

[Jessica] 
That. That is the thing that I... that keeps me awake at night, that like people are like, oh, I paid my $99 a month, 50 bucks a month, whatever it is, right? And that now I don't have to think about it. And it's like, no, no. No! [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
I think they've hit on something and it perhaps is what organizations want to think. It's wishful thinking and they're selling you on that. And it's not true, but you kind of wanna believe it's true, so that, I mean, it makes sense why they've just, you know, shot up in terms of popularity so quickly. And they have so much money and so much investment in this type of technology. But it is all taking away from experts that will actually help you fix issues on your website. So...

[Jessica] 
Also, it makes me sad if you take 50 million in investment and then the Federal Trade Commission fines you a million dollars for lying in your advertising, that's kind of, I mean, I hate to say it's a drop in the bucket, it's a million dollars, but like, that's not enough to make them stop,

[Caroline] 
Exactly.

[Jessica] 
And they've had years of using that clearly not-correct advertising to build a book of business. You know? I'm like, that's not gonna fix it. 

So I always wished for The Librarian from Snow Crash. I am finding that not as many people as I thought have read this book, but it's fine. These days I can actually sit and chat with ChatGPT. For the record, people, don't do it. I thought it was gonna be fabulous, but it's slow. While it's talking. I'm like, dude, speed it up. But, not to plug in other company's products or anything, Wispr Flow is amazing. You hold down a key and you can talk, and then it just like puts it into the ChatGPT box. It's amazing. Sometimes it even gets the grammar right, it's kind of fab.

So I'm just putting that out there. Like there is this whole world that is opening up, you know? If you're an accessibility professional, you'd probably use Dragon, right? But like, most people won't have encountered it, and the idea that it's becoming more mainstream to be able to just dictate, and use your voice to do things is kind of awesome. I think it's amazing that it's getting opened up.

Anyway, I was excited because I feel like I finally got something like The Librarian, an AI you can actually have a conversation with and be like, what about this thing and how does it relate to that topic? Let's discuss Russian literature. Let's discuss the ethics of AI, you know, with the AI.

Is there tech you've been waiting for and what is it?

[Caroline] 
It's an interesting question. I think my first response to this was, oh, we have enough technology that's not accessible. I really wish that we would just make the technology we already have accessible and I'm wondering when we're going to get to that, right? We're always building something new to stay relevant, to disrupt, to change things. Yes, to improve lives, but when do we actually get to the work of fixing problems with that technology?

And I think, the web content accessibility guidelines have been around for decades, and we're still
not getting to, like, alt text? One of the first requirements adde to WCAG and what's the reason? We're busy doing other things. We're busy building tech. We're trying to make money, we're trying to delight users with the new shiny object. And so part of me feels I don't know, speaking honestly, a bit resentful about that entire process and seeing how problematic it's been for us. I'm more interested in, I guess, the boring work, which would be making sure the thing works and is good and people like it and focused on that. 

I think that if I were to wish for one technology, and I think that we're getting there, it's when it comes to being new at accessibility, especially being like a new alt text writer and dealing with all of this nuance, I think it's nice to have a little coach along the way that kind of helps you understand what you need to know about accessibility and keeping that kind of relevant and important and just... Like kind of an ask me anything. But it's information that you can trust on accessibility specifically. So I don't know what that is, but it would be just like a treasure trove of information just about accessibility, answering any question that you have, and also explaining the nuance and the "it depends," and "it's complicated." Not trying to give you the answer that, you know, is oversimplifying, but actually explaining the complexity behind working through that requirement.

So I think that would be helpful in terms of just putting technology in the hands of people to do better accessibility work. And I don't think we're far off from that.

[Jessica] 
I hope not. My big test is always like to talk to the AI about accessibility and then, just be like, did you just hallucinate?

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
Did you just make up a whole thing for WCAG that sounds good, but isn't real? Because I'm like, there is no 1.4.2 that you just decided had this new name, right? That... that... what?

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
But I was like, damn, that was actually a really good one. It's too bad they don't have that, you know? But if you can't trust what it tells you, it puts you in a really scary situation. Like I worry about people who use it to generate content on topics they are not experts on, because,

[Caroline] 
100%.

[Jessica] 
it can write amazing stuff that is literally made up. You know, like I actually found myself going, wow, that's, God, I wish that was real. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
But like, it sounded so plausible. It's just, it's terrifying to me. And I was really weirded out because for a little while I decided to dabble with DeepSeek, you know, 'cause it was the new thing, new shiny. And it was so much better at understanding WCAG to the point where it had an argument with me because I was like, if you use emojis to make a menu, there is no way that that is like, okay, that can't possibly be okay. And it was like, yeah? And it just went to WCAG. It was like, see this, see this, see this, see this? It's totally okay. And I was like... Oh my God. I mean, it was like the most obnoxious accessibility expert. And I was like, just 'cause you can, doesn't mean you should. Right? And then you get into that whole thing, where it depends, but I was shocked that this thing threw down and was correct because it was the first time I'd experienced that. Usually I was like, why did you say this?

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
You know, people who don't understand this are gonna come to you for help and this is what you're telling them? And when you ask it, does this actually impact the whole thing or is this just between you and me that I've just corrected you on? What's the actual rules? And it goes, no, it's just between us. And I'm like, that means that millions of people could be asking you questions and like you're giving them untrustworthy answers. And...

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
That actually scares me because there's nothing worse than misinformation, right? Like I don't think it's doing it on purpose. So I won't call it disinformation, right? It's misinformation, right? Where it's all like, this is how you do it. And if that's not what it is, like if you decide to ask the AI to build you a game of Tetris, right? You know, and it produces something that like isn't following basic accessibility rules, you know, and you wouldn't necessarily know. It built me a marketing website. Right. But is it accessible? It said it was. Yeah. Well you know what? The guys down the street made a website for me and they said it was accessible. But guess what? I'm an expert. It's not accessible. And I was really mad 'cause, put it in your contracts, people. Be like, this website must be accessible, and then make them adhere to it because it was not, and I was really mad because I was like, I'm like, I trusted you. And those were people, right?

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
So like, you don't know.

[Caroline] 
I think that it would be cool if... yeah, you could trust absolutely every answer, and you know that the model was trained on academic research that had been done up until that point, and only providing answers with a hundred percent confidence, maybe then that would build some trust, right? But we know that's not the case. We know it wasn't based on academic research alone, and that oftentimes it's not sure it's doing its best. It's generating a response. It's trying to make you happy, you know, a happy customer.

[Jessica] 
That. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
Oh great, that like, I just got an answer and it would've taken me forever to find it. Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much. But is it wrong? [Caroline laughs]

[Jessica] 
Dude like, the EAA comes along, and I'm like, summarize it for me. And then I was like, that can't be right. So I sat down and read the whole thing because I didn't trust it and ironically it was actually correct. So like that's about the time that I figured out you can take an article, right? You can take a scientific research article and you can put it into ChatGPT and be like, tell me what this says. Explain like I'm five because I'm not someone who's into physics, but I kind of wanna understand what they're getting at, here. But even then you potentially have to check, right? Because you're asking it to summarize, but can you be sure?

[Caroline] 
Right. And ultimately you are responsible for publishing it.

[Jessica] 
Ding ding ding.

[Caroline] 
No one asked you to publish their response. You have to verify that that information is correct. And so yes, you still need deep knowledge and expertise in your area and should not be publishing information that you cannot verify. So it's really up to you. It's assisting you in like your work. It's doing its best as we said, but like. You are ultimately responsible for every word that you write. I just want people to remember that, just 'cause you got there fast, you know, there's also like your reputation on the line and like, would do you stand behind this work? And is this any good? So, you know, wouldn't it be great if we just published what we believed in and thought was good and we're proud of and maybe moved a bit slower in getting there,

[Jessica] 
Yeah, I read someone saying something quite simple, right? If you couldn't be bothered to write this, why should I be bothered to read it?

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
That really resonated with me because I was like, that's valid. You know? And I like using it for being like, here's my hateful thoughts of today. Please make this sound more professional. You know. To me, I'm like, you gotta find how to use it in your workflow. But recognize that like, it has limitations. And I think there's way too much desire to believe, you know what I mean? It's, it's the snake oil thing, it's the overlays. Right? It all ties back to the same thing where we just want to believe that this is gonna solve all our problems. And you're like, no, it's more like a collaborator, you know? Like,

[Caroline] 
Right, thank you for helping me organize my thinking as a collaborator and develop a plan for writing this. Yeah.

[Jessica] 
But like let it just do the thing? No. Like, no. Also, as you said, it's your reputation. It's your name on it, and for the record, anyone who's listening to this, everything generated by AI cannot be copyrighted. So it does matter. It matters a lot. You know, like you want ownership of your own work. And yes, I know. They have run roughshod over any kind of sense of copyright or authorship or any of that. It just siphoned all your stuff. It's kind of ugly, but the genie is out of the bottle. And to me, it actually makes copyright mean more now, you know? So we need to be bearing that in mind. 

I think we should talk about alt text because this is what Caroline does, people. Caroline does alt text. So welcome to your very brief, but somewhat of a masterclass, I suspect. So Caroline, what topics would you like to start with?

[Caroline] 
Whew. We could get into so many areas. Maybe the most common problems that occur with alt text that I've seen, because I spend all day, every day reading the alt text that people have published to the web. And I wanna call out that probably the most common issue that I find is formulaic alt text. And I wanna talk about that one because there's so much of it. I use that term formulaic alt text to mean anything that just has been placed in the alt attribute field that was generated by some sort of formula, right? Like the engineering team, the web team, is attempting to say, this plus this equals alt text in all cases, right? Not considering context or nuance or anything like that. But like, think of product pages and the product images that exist there. I'm gonna say something like 95% of e-commerce websites are doing formulaic alt text right now, which is like, image + number in sequence = alt text. Or, product title + number = alt text. So all of the alt text is different because of the number, but it's not descriptive because it's a formula. 

And you can't just put anything in the alt attribute and then call it a day, like it needs to be descriptive, it needs to be meaningful. The WCAG requirements are that alt text should provide an equivalent description for that image. And how is "product title + image sequence number" descriptive at all? In fact, listen to that with a screen reader turned on, and it's quite annoying. It's repetitive. You already heard that title. It exists on the page, but then you have to hear it 5, 6, 7, 10 more times, however many images are there, and you are left with absolutely nothing when there could have been an opportunity for that brand or business to describe every angle of their product and give people the confidence in buying it. That's why the images on a product page are there in the first place. 

So, formulaic alt text absolutely needs to stop. It's a placeholder. Businesses are not circling back to add meaningful alt text later. It kind of seems like that's maybe it and we think we're done. But I would advocate that is just causing more trouble than it's worth. It's really not meeting the accessibility requirements at all.

[Jessica] 
Oh no, I'm just gonna call it out and say it's mean. Like that's actually mean. You are making the experience intentionally worse for someone else. My immediate thought was that that's actually just the file names, because I see that happen a lot where the file name is like, "product, number." Right? Because they're just making the images and they upload them. And some CMSs will actually just go, well, you left it blank, we'll just take the file name and put it in there, like...there are more than just WCAG, people. There's something called ATAG, which is the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines which is actually to stop that kind of thing from happening. And yet, you can find website builders and things where it will do those kind of things by default. They may not even be doing this on purpose, right? But I think Caroline's dead right here. They didn't circle back. No one actually checked. They were just like, good enough. Off it goes. And good enough just isn't when it's like that.

[Caroline] 
How do you argue for the budget to do the work properly when you've taken that step? And, oh, well, is something there? Yeah. It's not right. It definitely doesn't meet accessibility requirements. We're still exposed, but is something there? Okay. Yeah. We'll come back to it someday. I just don't think that that's helpful at all. And it completely misunderstands the requirements and also the opportunity, the potential of these images to actually add information to help with discoverability to surface in image results for different types of keywords that you would've never even considered. But the act of writing alt text encourages you to think about your products and what you're showing, what you're displaying in a completely different way than how you wrote that product description, how you listed out the specifications. Alt text is extremely valuable in that sense as well, so it's just a complete miss to neglect alt text.

[Jessica] 
That was fab. I'm gonna mention it again 'cause I can. Tennessee is doing this whole push for tourism in Tennessee and what they're doing is having local artists write songs for image descriptions. They write lyrics and music and then they use that as alt text to describe places and what the images make you feel. It's fabulous. I shared a video. It's in our newsletter, everyone. You know. I shared a video 'cause they explained the theory behind it and what they're doing, and they're aiming for a thousand images by the end of the year. And some of their descriptions literally gave me chills where I was like, whew. Goosebumps! Right? And like, you can do that, you can help people feel what the image is meant to convey. Like, "file name, product name, seven." Are you just being cruel? [Jessica laughs] Like, I don't know about you, but I don't think that's helpful and being told repeatedly: file name one, file name two, file name three... That is not actually gonna help me. And there aren't a lot of really simple ways to skip over that if you are using a screen reader. You could be telling people a story about why they want your t-shirt, your shoes. There's a company we dealt with recently that sells really lovely high-end furniture and their alt text sells their products. And I was like, wow. I'm like, that's so much cooler than I thought it looked like. But if you get someone who knows it to tell you what it is, what you're looking at. What they're trying to convey. And I think that's the main thing I feel people miss is the conveyance of meaning.

[Caroline] 
Yes, yes.

[Jessica] 
Like, it's not just a woman looking confused at a laptop, right? Like sure. I can tell you that's exactly what the image was. That's why it stuck with me. Because I was like, that is an accurate description, but how does that help me? How does that give me any better understanding of what's going on in this context? You're not even setting a mood with that description. You know what I mean?

[Caroline] 
I, I love in one of our first conversations, Jess, you said I like to think of alt text as an interruption. And I... I loved that because if you think about it as an interruption, then you think about, well, I really need to add something here. I need to add something meaningful here. Because we've stopped this, we've stopped the programming to send you this message. It better be good. Right? It should add to the experience, not take away from it. Not make it annoying to navigate a page. I think being very intentional with what you're putting into the alt attribute and being aware that it is potentially interrupting an experience, I think that changes the way you think about the description.

[Jessica] 
I think that is actually really smart. It's like someone shouting, "image: banana" while you're trying to read. [Jessica laughs] Like, you know, like how does that help? Right. And like, it's a funny one because with the power of the web today, you can use your CSS to move images anywhere you want visually, right? So you could put them programmatically in places that flow. And then use CSS to just put them wherever you want them to be visually and then you actually get the best of both worlds, where your alt text actually fits into the story you're telling and feels less of like, just random, "image: banana." Like maybe that banana actually matters, but like if it came at the right time, you might feel like, oh, actually that added something. So I think it's one of those ones where like, there's so much more nuance than anyone realizes. And I hadn't considered what you said about Google, though. It's such an important consideration. Like I use image search all the time. I've often wondered how it categorizes the images and the alt text is the simplest and most obvious answer is that like, what is in this image? The alt text describes it, so you might actually be better off being a bit more descriptive and talking about it. Because when we image search, we don't usually say "woman looking confused at laptop." We're talking about how it feels, what the mood is,

[Caroline] 
And this is only becoming more relevant when we talk about personalized shopping experiences, voice assistance, where we're no longer potentially shopping with our eyes. We're shopping with our ears. Okay. So that's an important form of assistive technology where navigating the web in alternative ways all of a sudden becomes very relevant, right? And when you think about like this personalized shopping assistant that exists on an e-commerce website, being able to answer questions about what products look like, that comes from rich descriptive metadata like alt text, where you've gone a step further to actually describe the image. And if that's done by teams that actually know those images and what they mean and how to describe them, then that becomes a way where your personalized shopping experience is selling your products, 24/7. Your metadata is doing the work. It's one of the best salespeople you could ask for. Because it's answering those questions and it's helping increase the confidence of people to buy products. And we're talking about everyone being able to answer questions for everyone. So I think alt text, really good exceptional quality alt text, is only becoming more relevant. It has this direct impact on users in so many ways that it's what you've been missing. And it powers the technologies that we're talking about in the future. So I'm pretty biased, but really good quality alt text. There's definitely a business case for it as well.

[Jessica] 
Oh, definitely. And I think we are heading in a totally new direction. Personally, I'm gonna say this, this is June, 2025. Every time we talk about the future I try to put a date on it, so they go like, well, that totally happened. You're behind the times. I think we are gonna leave the place where we do all the web with our eyes. That that is the default. I think we are gonna move to a place where like, it'll just be easier. This is what I meant about The Librarian. Reading about that kind of AI you could interact with and just talk to, I was like, that's what I want. You know, I was young, it's been like 30 years and I'm like, where's my thing?

[Caroline] 
Mhm.

[Jessica] 
But I think often about that. When I think about my own personal lifestyle, I want to be able to be cooking and just ask questions, right? Like, it infuriates me that if I say "Siri, do I need an umbrella?" It shows me the weather report. I want a yes or no. If I leave the house right now, do I need an umbrella? Assess the information for me and give me an answer. You can say no and you know, it rains on me and I'll at least accept you've tried. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
And like, I want to be able to do my shopping while I'm making dinner, right? If I'm like, actually, you know, I really need to dress for this event, help me pick one. We're getting to a place where the AI is gonna know your tastes, know the kind of things you want, ask questions about the event and what the rules are... and then be like, well, you need this size based on your measurements. So, you know, like, here's some options, but I don't wanna be looking at them, right? I'm busy doing something I care more about. So I want it to just describe it and give me the, the feeling like how I might feel wearing that dress. You know what I mean? There's, there's so much more we're gonna be doing, and I think we're like on the cusp of something really amazing. And it's so weird to me because again, it's gonna be using technology that exists to help people with disabilities. It's going to become mainstream, and everyone would be like, how did we live without this? And it's like, there's a bunch of people who needed this. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
Yeah, and those product images, they do so much for a product page. Oftentimes they're a suggestion on how to style something. The model is actually showing how to style this with a different piece that you might already have in your closet or might exist to buy. Sometimes they're giving measurements. In tables and with complex diagrams in images and not explaining that anywhere else on the page. So this is very, very important information that you absolutely need to include. So when I look at these images, I think they're serving an extremely important purpose here, and we're relying on a lot in terms of actually being able to see them in order to have that confidence to buy. And that's just, I mean, we're touching kind of on an important area of alt text, which is context. It's probably one of the most important things to understand about alt text that just literally describing the image or using a very clinical approach to describing an image, it just doesn't work because you have to think like, why is this image here? What role is it playing? What's its purpose? What's it doing? What's it adding to the experience and describing that instead of just being so literal, so your alt text actually changes based on the page that that image exists on. So, you know, imagine that product page. Okay, we're giving, at this point, customers are trying to find out absolutely everything. They are detail oriented. They are digging into it. They are very close to buying your product, and they are looking at specifics. Take those same product images and put them on social media. What are you trying to do there? You're catching users that are just kind of browsing and they didn't know they were shopping yet until they came across an image that was like, so enticing that it stopped their scroll and then they were curious. And it's like, gimme the interesting details about this. Give me what's unique about this. Right? Or if it's about a campaign, like how do these products fit in with that campaign, you might describe the image differently, and going all the way into the details like you did on the product page doesn't make sense in that context. So we actually don't need just one version of alt text. We need many different versions of alt text. Based on where we're publishing these images and where are we storing this information? Where does it go? We're making this decision on what the alt texts needs to be at the very end of the process, and then it never makes it back into any sort of database or centralized repository, this is a huge miss because it just continues to make alt text a challenging thing to do. So just context, many different versions of alt text, many different individual experts within a workflow contributing to these rich descriptions is important. And then ultimately it becomes more sustainable because alt text is, in my opinion, kind of everyone's job. If you're touching the content in some way, then you need to care about this. And it's not just one person's job. I think that the quality ultimately suffers when you look at it that way. What can the product team contribute to descriptive information? What can the marketing team contribute to descriptive information? They all have different viewpoints that are important that end up creating better quality alt texts at the end of the process.

[Jessica] 
Okay. Roll back a little more than a year. Caroline did a presentation at CSUN that was almost like a more interactive workshop about what the alt text for images should be. Remember like CSUN is a lot of accessibility experts gathering together. And one of the things I remember about it was there was an image of a painting where a man had a skull and he'd stuck his finger in the, what do you call it? The nose hole of the skull? I'm sorry. I swear I studied biology for a bunch of years, and yet I don't know what that's called. And what was fascinating to me is that we started with the literal, what I just told you, right? It's a painting, a man sticking his finger in the nose hole of a skull, right? And over time it came out that like this image is from a specific period in history. It's a Memento Mori, right? And what that means, and what he was actually saying, was he was defying his own fear of death, right? And like, there's so much more going on in this image. And we started with, poking his finger in the... And if I remember correctly, if it was actually like a social media post, so it had, "me when visiting the museum."

[Caroline] 
It was a meme.

[Jessica] 
They were laughing at themselves, right? They made it a meme. But what was actually in that image was so much more powerful and poignant. And without that information, you are actually missing out on this potential new level of understanding. And maybe I'm just more curious than most people, but it really resonated with me, and I've been thinking about it ever since, that like, why you chose that image matters, right? And the context you put it in matters. I'm sure for the meme, that's probably enough information. You know. But for me, I actually kind of wanna know more and then we get into that extended description thing of, okay, you've told me what it is, right? But can you gimme some more background? Because like, I'm now actually interested in this image.

[Caroline] 
Right. I think that memes are a great... a great way to understand how context can change how you describe an image. Because you change the caption, that's the text that's on that meme, and you change your description. Right? It's a punchline. The image is a punchline. So I think it's important to study what's happening to you when you read those words and how that changes your understanding of that image. And that is what you're trying to replicate, right? You're trying to replicate what was that experience of looking at that image and then discovering the joke and why it's funny how the caption and the image go together. It's a great way to understand context, so pay attention to memes, attempt to describe memes, attempt to convey humor. And you learn a lot about how nuanced this work is.

[Jessica] 
See how great you are, Caroline? [Both laugh]

[Jessica] 
That's why I was like, I knew she was gonna be perfect for this.

[Caroline, laughing] 
Aw.

[Jessica] 
But yeah, seriously, I've never forgotten it. It's the question I come back to consistently: Is bad alt text better than no alt text?

[Caroline] 
Ooh. [Caroline laughs] Ooh. Yeah. And yeah, I actually have a similar phrase that I use often in training: Is better than nothing good enough? Like,

[Jessica] 
Ooh.

[Caroline] 
I am going to challenge that and, because I'm looking at it through like image description and I've just seen just... bad quality. And I don't know if I believe in better than nothing is good enough or it's as much as I can do right now. I think ultimately that's maybe not a good philosophy or approach when it comes to image description. I've even started struggling, and some people are gonna be mad about this, I've even started struggling with the phrase, "progress over perfection," to be honest, because it feels like we never get there or have no plan to get there. And yes, it sounds nice to say that, and it sounds encouraging, like keep going, but like, so often I've seen there is no plan to circle back or there's no plan to properly proceed from here. That like, it becomes... It's starting to sound like an excuse. I'm all for progress. Absolutely. But I think sometimes these mantras get in the way of actual progress,


[Jessica] 
I think for me it's what I tell people about PDFs, you draw a line in the sand, right? And you say, from this day, we are doing it differently, we're gonna have alternative versions. We're going to go through and try to make this PDF better when we make it, right? Because PDF remediation is a horror show. But you can stop digging the hole, right? Just stop digging, and be like, from here, we're gonna do it differently. And over time we will find a way to go back and fix all these other things, right? But you need to stop the bleeding. And for me, like, I like the phrase, progress over perfection, sometimes, you know, but like, I need to feel like you are moving forward, right? One of the ways you can do that is just to be like, okay, from today, we do this differently.

[Caroline] 
Yes.

[Jessica] 
And that way we stop adding to the problem, right? And to me that weirdly fits into my world of progress over perfection. Because you're like, we'll get this started and then we'll figure out a way to go back and maybe you'll find you just don't need those PDFs. You know what? [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
Yeah.

[Jessica] 
Maybe you could just start deleting them. It could happen. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline] 
That's actually something that I took from book publishing and I bring it into my work today, is that same philosophy of, it was always a front list, back list conversation, right? And I think of front list, back list often, which is exactly what you're talking about. It's a completely different, they're completely different workflows, right? What do we do to publish born-accessible content? What needs to change about our workflows and our process and our systems in order to get there, in order to make that process easier for everyone to achieve? And then what do we do about this large volume of content, this backlist content that was unfortunately published in an inaccessible way? What's our plan for going back? Right? And you almost need to think about this in two different workflows and two different strategies, but have a strategy, right? You can't just, put it to the side and say, we'll work on back list later, much later. You need to actually have two different approaches. So, that's totally intimidating, right? The amount of inaccessible information that has already been published to the web and what are you gonna do about it, right? That's everyone's problem. And when I was working in book publishing, I watched them make this transition of how do we digitize all of our print books? How can we possibly do that? And you chip away at it over time. You commit to doing that work over and over again every year until it's done. And then you probably have more to do. There's always more to do. So you just need to keep recommitting to accessibility every single year because you haven't been, because it should have been in your budget. It should have been part of your standard operating procedure. But it was not there. It was overlooked. So now it takes, you know, correcting for that, but doing it in a smart way, thinking about, go forward, thinking about what do we do about what we already published? And then you start thinking about actually solving the problem. That's true progress.

[Jessica] 
Yeah, it's an interesting phrase, isn't it? It kind of makes you feel good until you scratch the surface. It's like, take back control, right? You're like, what does that even mean? [Both laugh] Like, what does that even mean? But, [Jessica sighs] I think I worry a lot that as much as I laugh about it when I was getting into accessibility, I read someone on social media say they were done with the industry, right? They're like, I'm done. All I do is stand on stages and yell at people. And I was like, that's the job for me. [Jessica laughs] I was like, I love this idea. I'll stand on a stage and yell at people all day. I'm like, sounds fab. Sign me up. But over time I've realized that one of the things I said in one of my presentations at CSUN is actually accurate, right? You have to let go of your anger. Like, I am mad a lot of the time. I'm so frustrated. I'm so like, why can't you just be better? And I know it shows right, and we all feel it, right? But when it comes to convincing people that they need to change things, that doesn't work. You have to let go of the anger, you don't get to be a Sith Lord with other people. You can do it with all the other accessibility people 'cause we get it right? [Jessica laughs] But like, you have to find that way in, because I think in a lot of cases, it's not just that accessibility feels intimidating, it's they've felt judged. Like they did it wrong and then we were mean to them. You know? [Jessica laughs] They were like, well, now I don't even wanna engage with it because you made me feel bad.

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
And I'm like, oh no. Right? Because like, do I wanna yell at you? Desperately. Am I going to? No. But if I can get you to experience it yourself, you may hit that what has been seen cannot be unseen moment.

[Caroline] 
Right. So many people message me being like, I can't unsee this. And I'm like, you know, well go forth and start being an advocate because you can make the web a better place. You have agency, it's like you might not be able to fix everything, but man, you can fix your stuff.

[Caroline] 
It's knowing who you're talking to. Absolutely. And changing up the way you talk about accessibility in that conversation, right? So if you're talking to designers, how is accessibility just bad design? It's, you know, and like, let's get frustrated about the problem together. It's us against this problem of like, just bad design. Let's figure it out. Like, you know, no judgment at all. What can we do to design this in a different way? You have to think about protecting your work, protecting accessibility that you care about so much, and what's the best way to do that with different teams? How do you need to change up your approach? Yes, unfortunately you may need to talk about the business case behind this to folks involved in the business and that would care about the business case, right? So you need to change it up. So be flexible, be agile about how you're talking about the problem, and make it relevant. You don't have to say everything, make it relevant to the room you are in, to the people you are talking to, and that helps accessibility work. Move forward.

[Jessica] 
That's a really good point, because it does depend on who you're talking to, where you're like, you should do that. I talk to content editors a lot.

[Caroline] 
Yeah.

[Jessica] 
And there's nothing worse than taking away someone's feeling of agency, right? So it's like, well, I can't access the code, right? They're like, I can't do X, Y, Z, right? So you're like, okay, well let's talk about what you can do, You can impact the alt text, you can look at the context of the page, right? That's the problem with AI, it looks at the image in isolation, and too many people do that, right? So it's like, now you've got the page, you've got the thing. Think about what it should be. You have the authority to change it in a lot of cases, right? You can just be like, actually that was terrible. Why don't we do it better?

[Caroline] 
Right.

[Jessica] 
You can make sure that your links have link texts that actually make sense and you don't have a page covered with "Read more," "Click here." Right? You have the ability to change those kind of things, so figuring out what they can change and making sure you talk to them about that instead of being like, here's this whole big world of all these things and a bunch of them are things you don't understand and probably never will, right? Like I feel like we just get it wrong sometimes. Like we don't teach it in the right ways and we don't teach it gently. I sat through training where like, they were actually showing it to people who do training to get input and feedback. [Jessica laughs] And they're like, right, so you know, here's the page and we're just gonna show you how it sounds with the screen reader. And I was like, what the heck are you doing? And someone actually suggested they should turn their screen off and just make everyone listen to it. And I was like, is this for accessibility professionals or is this for regular people? I was like, 'cause you know, you need to figure it out. How about we take a page, right? Really basic, maybe a form, an image, right? And we walk through what's on it, with your keyboard. So people see this is an image, this is the form, it has these fields, right? Then you turn the screen reader on so they can hear it, but you do it slowly, on the things you just explained. Right. Because otherwise it's just overload of like, I've never thought about listening to the web and now it's reading out all these things I don't understand, you know? You're just gonna make people scared. When I encountered accessibility, my weird aha moment was actually listening to a screen reader and I said, this cannot be the way people interact with the web.


[Jessica]
I was like, there has to be something better. Because this is terrible. Right. I get it now. I do understand. I've used it enough to be like, oh, actually this is really fast once you know what you're doing. But I just felt like this could not be the best solution. I felt like we were punishing people. The web is this magical place. The internet is a magical place to me. I was like, and I feel like you're actually cutting people out of it and like, that's not cool. What if that happened to me? [Jessica laughs] It just changed everything for me. 'cause I was like, we need to change this, right? If this is the technology we've got, how do we make things better?


[Caroline]
Yeah. Yeah, totally.


[Jessica]
Okay, so, is there anything you want to cover? Is there any point you wanna make? Is there a rant you want to have?


[Caroline]
I have probably one more little thing I can say about alt text. So when it comes to managing image descriptions, we're kind of, at Scribely, we're attacking this problem in a different way, right? Where we are looking at advising companies on end-to-end workflow solutions. So we're moving away from this like, transactional approach of like, have us come in at the end and just fix everything. Right? How can we help you fix the workflow along the way to design a better process that's more sustainable for alt text that just naturally flows with your workflows and your teams, and absolutely there are areas to bring in AI. We need to be thinking about metadata all along the way. We need to be setting up data repositories that actually store information, pass information from team to team. We need to be designing processes. We need to create style guides. We need to figure out how we can use what we've created for alt text for other purposes that serve the business. Like how can we generate more keywords? How does this impact SEO? How does this potentially translate to this personalized shopping experience that you're building? Attaching it to other goals along the way. But looking at image descriptions as really this entire process that you've been overlooking and where can we put that back in? 

So we're diagramming workflows. We're figuring out what needs to change. We're developing a frontlist and back list plan. We're in your corner trying to think about this, so actually solving this problem, finally. Right? In a way that's sustainable. That's based on years of experience doing this work and talking to organizations about what their problems are. 

So that's... that's kind of the Scribely 2.0 I'm really excited about. Of course we can absolutely write image descriptions, but I think that the problem is becoming more of a structural one or a systemic one that we need to solve. And if we want to truly make an impact, then we need to address what is actually the problem. It's not the lack of writers, right? Really it's a systemic issue. And alt texts is just absolutely falling through the cracks at multiple stages across the workflow. And let's figure out how to stop that from happening.


[Jessica]
That was brilliant. Also, I'm really stoked because that just totally sold what you do. That is not getting cut. That is going in there in its entirety. But I haven't decided if we should just end with that 'cause that is hot.


[Caroline]
Yeah, it's what I've discovered, after five years of doing this work, is actually the problem.


[Jessica]
Because we're fighting the symptoms. Yep.


[Caroline]
Yes, we're fighting the symptoms, we're fighting the systemic decisions that were made along the way that have made it impossible to manage this work properly. And addressing those issues. And you know what? You can do it, you can absolutely use your existing internal resources to manage this process. You don't have to put it at the end and have this remediation mindset, or this giant bill when it comes to writing alt text at the very end of your process, you can absolutely infuse it along the way and use AI in a really smart way that's actually informing the AI on how to draft that first pass description. And then hopefully along the way, it has other passes that it's taken to create an even better description. But the idea is, own your descriptive information, own your metadata, and then, alt text becomes easier. It just doesn't have a home. That's the problem. So, I think that the future is bright. I'm excited. As worried as I am about AI, I am excited about the possibilities of what it can do for workflows.

[Jessica]
You are such an inspiration, Caroline.

[Caroline]
Aw.

[Jessica]
Do you have any advice for women who want to get into tech? You are a literal female CEO. You are so rare.

[Caroline]
This is... This is a topic I feel so, so passionate about. I do identify as a feminist, and I believe that women should be in all aspects of work, and we should be creating spaces that include women everywhere. And it's troubling to see how few female CEOs there are out there. And that's a problem that we should address. I think that– I'm very proud Scribely is a woman-owned business. A hundred percent. I've bootstrapped this business from the very beginning, and I think that's because I've kind of felt like I needed to prove myself in a way? If I'm speaking honestly, like, I don't know where that comes from in me, but it was... I need to do this. I need to show that I belong here. I need to show that this business can thrive. And Scribely has been growing based on, organically, based on clients wanting to work with us over time and more and more of them happening. But we're just not seeing the same VC investments in female founders. That's troubling. I didn't choose to go that route, maybe because of knowing that fact. But it's just such a tough space. 

I think... I want women in tech to keep going, but I know it's a lot. So I'm also asking for spaces that make women feel like they belong there and can thrive and don't make it so, so difficult, like a daily fight of proving yourself. So if you are working, at an organization and you see, you know, a female colleague that is trying to make it happen and is quite passionate, please don't staunch that out. Nurture it, bring her into conversations, ask for her opinions and her perspectives and her ideas on what she wants to contribute. Because I think that's how we truly advance if we bring in these different mindsets. 

So I'm so, so passionate about this topic. Very proud to be a woman-owned business at Scribely. It's not easy. But yeah, I just, I wanna say anyone out there who ever wants to talk about that. I would always invite any conversation and support others along the way.

[Jessica]
Oh, women helping women.

[Caroline]
Yes. [Caroline laughs]

[Jessica]
Thank you. This has been absolutely amazing.

[Caroline]
I love this conversation. Thank you for having me.

[Jessica]
I had so much fun. [Jessica laughs]

[Caroline]
Yes. Same. I just think podcasts are great. I love this format. I love that you're doing it. You have a great way of hosting and making people feel so at ease. So just thank you for having me.

[Jessica]
Aw. 

[End of conversation. Outro, Jessica voice over]
That's a wrap for this episode of The Outer Circle. We called it that because accessibility can sometimes feel like a closed-off world, like there's an inner circle of experts and everyone else is stuck on the outside. But that's not how it should be. We talk to the people doing the work, from seasoned pros to unsung heroes, because their stories help us all see accessibility from a different angle. Sometimes surprising, always insightful. 

If this resonated with you, follow the show, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Until next time, keep breaking barriers.

[End of transcript]