Hi there,
My site is highly photography-driven, and a large portion of my images are displayed within galleries. Currently, there is no way to add alt text to images inside these galleries.
This creates two critical issues:
-
Loss of accessibility
Without alt text, visually impaired users relying on screen readers cannot access or understand the content of these images. This puts gallery images out of alignment with accessibility standards and best practices.
-
Loss of discoverability (image SEO)
Search engines rely on alt text to understand and index images. Because gallery images cannot have alt text, they are effectively invisible to search engines, reducing their ability to appear in image search results and limiting overall site discoverability. (As a largely photo-driven publication, this is particularly hurtful to my site’s growth.)
Since most of my images are in galleries (95+%), they have diminished reach.
Adding support for alt text in gallery images would restore both (basic & best practice) accessibility and search visibility for a large portion of site content.
It seems there were workarounds discussed in this thread here, but I really think this is a critical feature to have and a large accessibility + seo oversight that it doesn’t exist.
Thanks!
Not at all disagreeing with you that it should be possible to do alt text and captions on galleries. But if you need a workaround meanwhile, here’s some code that turns images into a carousel:
I had this issue awhile back and someone from the Ghost Pro team commented to let me know that you drag the image out of the gallery, add the alt text, and then drag it back into the gallery. Try it and hit publish and then check it on your site by right clicking an image in the gallery and selecting “inspect”. Note that if you drag the image out again, it removes the alt text, so unfortunately you can’t actually check it once you set it in the editor.
Thanks both for the suggestions!
Re the carousel - This is great Cathy! Unfortunately it doesn’t suit the way I like to incorporate my photography, but thank you for sharing nonetheless and I’m sure it will help others!
Re the dragging in and out of gallery - Thanks for sharing this! I also saw this in another thread. Unfortunately I have a really high volume of images (usually 60+ per article, and 200+ articles), so dragging in and out of galleries just really isn’t a practical option for me, and seems very tedious to essentially fulfill what is a basic accessibility requirement and important seo aspect. I love publishing on Ghost but I do think this is a real barrier to photography/image-driven publishers in being both baseline accessible and discoverable.
While in the future I suppose I could not use galleries in general, solo images would just be way too large on the page with my theme and not look right…
I hope this is something that can be addressed in the future 
FWIW from an accessibility POV, doing all alt-text as a caption rather than as alt-text is preferable. So eg I usually just (whether a gallery or single-image) put my caption and then type in the alt text of the image right after it, in ital parens, eg (cut off image since that’s not really the point. From this, today.)
LifeIsASacredText: I appreciate your comment and intent to help, but just so you are aware, and for your own site, what you’ve shared isn’t accurate.
Alt text and captions serve different roles, and one can’t replace the other.
Alt text is specifically designed for screen readers. It provides a concise, non-visual description of the image that’s announced automatically when the image is encountered. Captions, on the other hand, are visible to everyone and provide additional context, but they are not consistently read in place of alt text by assistive technologies, and relying on them alone can create gaps in the experience.
Best practice (including WCAG guidance) is:
If alt text is missing, screen readers may skip the image entirely or read the filename instead, which is a clear accessibility failure. So while captions are valuable, they don’t substitute for proper alt text; they simply complement it.
There’s also an image SEO dimension: search engines use alt text (along with filenames) to understand and index images. Captions can help, but they don’t carry the same weight or function. So relying on captions instead of alt text results in a loss of both accessibility and image discoverability. Best practice is to use both: alt text for description and captions for context, rather than treating them as interchangeable.
So SEO may be a factor but I am literally telling you what my deafblind professional disability access consultant told me, so I hold by her, and I have had numerous readers thank me since I moved image descriptions from alt to main caption.
