AltPost: The Plugin We Built Because We Were Sick of Writing Alt Text
A small tool we made for our own websites, now free for anyone on WordPress.org.
The Job Nobody Wants to Do
Every image on a website needs alt text: a short written description for people who use screen readers, and for Google, which can’t see pictures either. A busy website has hundreds of images. A WooCommerce shop can have thousands.
Writing it is tedious, so it gets skipped. We’d finish a build for a client, run an accessibility check, and find a long list of images with no description, or worse, a filename like IMG_4471.jpg standing in for one. Then someone had to sit down and write them all.
It also stopped being optional. The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, and it means many Irish businesses now have to make their websites accessible. Missing alt text is one of the first things an accessibility audit picks up.
So We Built a Fix
We looked at the plugins already out there. Most needed you to set up your own AI account, paste in an API key and manage the billing yourself. For our clients, that was a non-starter.
So we built our own. AltPost looks at each image, writes a plain description of what’s in it, and saves it as the alt text. It scans a whole media library, finds the images with nothing or a filename where the description should be, and works through them in batches while you get on with something else. You can edit any description it writes, and roll back to the old one if you prefer it.
No API keys. No AI account to manage. You install it, register with an email address, and it works.
Then We Published It
It worked well enough on our own sites that it felt wrong to keep it to ourselves. AltPost is now on the official WordPress.org plugin directory, free to install, with a free monthly allowance that covers a typical small site. Bigger sites can upgrade for more.
It works with the page builders people actually use, including Elementor, Gutenberg, Divi and Bricks, and it gets along with the usual caching plugins.
Why This Matters If You’re a Client
AltPost is a small product. The reason it’s on this website is what it says about how we work.
When something slows down our own work, we don’t put up with it and we don’t wait for someone else to fix it. We build the fix. The same goes for our clients: a booking process that no plugin handles, two systems that won’t talk to each other, a job that eats an hour of someone’s day. We’ve built tools for all of those, and some of them, like AltPost and AutoLens, grew into products.
If your business has a job like that, tell us about it.
Have a Tedious Job You’d Like to Get Rid Of?
Tell us what eats your team’s time. We’ll tell you plainly whether it’s worth building a fix, and what it would take.