Project note, August 2026: This post comes from SoCalNomad’s media alt-text remediation and carousel cleanup.
The alt-text audit began with a straightforward accessibility problem.
Only about six percent of the WordPress media library had useful alternative text. The plan was to derive conservative descriptions from the parent article and date, preserve anything already written by hand, and improve coverage without inventing visual detail.
The audit uncovered a second problem: 281 images did not belong in the library at all.
Temporary Cards Had Become Permanent Media
The Instagram publisher used WordPress as a staging point for generated carousel cards. Earlier versions did not reliably remove those files after the social platform accepted them.
The cards had no continuing role in an article, gallery, or featured image. They were pipeline intermediates that had quietly become 36 percent of the media library.
Storage was only part of the cost. The orphaned attachments polluted searches, complicated audits, and made the alt-text denominator look like a content problem when much of it was a lifecycle problem.
Remediation Needed Two Paths
Legitimate media received alt text based on known context:
- Existing alt text was never overwritten.
- Parent post titles and dates supplied a restrained fallback.
- Featured-image relationships and known NewsDesk filename patterns helped recover context.
The generated social cards followed a different path. Before deletion, they were checked against post content and attachment relationships to confirm that no published page depended on them.
After separating real assets from temporary debris, the retained media reached complete metadata coverage under the project’s current rules.
Metadata Updates Do Not Rewrite Old HTML
WordPress featured images read current attachment metadata when rendering, so those improvements appeared immediately.
Images embedded directly in historical post content can carry alt attributes baked into saved HTML. Updating the attachment record does not necessarily rewrite those old tags.
That distinction prevents an inflated claim. The media library can have complete attachment metadata while some historical in-body markup still needs a separate rewrite pass.
Cleanup Belongs To The Publisher
The social publisher now removes temporary slide media after successful publication. A failed run retains enough state for diagnosis, while a completed run does not leave production artifacts behind.
The lasting lesson was larger than alt text. Media pipelines need an explicit lifecycle:
create -> stage -> publish -> verify -> remove temporary assetsWhen the final step is optional, the CMS becomes a junk drawer. Accessibility work happened to reveal how full this one had become.