Your alt text passes automated checks. That doesn’t mean it’s any good.

The GitHub Blog reports that more than one in four images on the web's most popular home pages have alt text that's missing, vague, or copied from adjacent images. The post details how the team built an alt text plugin for the GitHub Accessibility Scanner, drawing a line between what a checker can prove and what it can only suspect. The plugin uses five deterministic rules by default, with an optional model-based check that requires explicit opt-in due to privacy and cost. The piece highlights the tradeoff between false positives and reliability, noting that a reliable checker developers actually enable beats one that gets switched off.

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