Rich text images should fall back to the media item’s Alt text
When editors insert an image from the Media library into a rich text field, the ‘Alternative description’ field in the Insert/Edit Image dialog is empty. It ignores the Alt text already set on the media item. Editors have to type the same Alt text again every time they use that image in rich text.
This causes three problems:
- Duplicated effort: Alt text written once on the asset has to be written again for every use.
- Accessibility risk: if editors skip the dialog field, the image goes live with no Alt text even though the asset has one.
- Stale copies: fixing the Alt text on the media item doesn’t update rich text that already uses the image, so the improvement never reaches existing pages.
Proposed solution:
Fall back to the media item’s Alt text when the image’s own Alt text is empty. Content Graph’s rich text output (json and html) would return the media item’s current AltText. Fixing the asset would then update every place it’s used, with no republishing.
Prefill the dialog on insert. When an image is inserted from the Media library, copy the media item’s Alt text into the ‘Alternative description’ field so editors can see it and change it for that use.
Alt text an editor enters in the dialog should always take priority over the fallback.
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