WordPress Mu and image alt tags–customizing the backend

Hi all,

I work for a state university that is considering WordPress Mu as a CMS for our Web site. One thing that is very important to us as a state university is adhering to section 508 guidelines for Web accessibility, and we’re running into a problem with WPMU and image alt tags.

Currently, WordPress is set up such that the Title or Caption of an image is inserted as the alternative text. The Title is a required field, so technically, every image always has alternate text.

This would be fine, except the title of the image defaults to the file name upon upload. The image file name is most often not meaningful (ie. “DSCN1899” vs. “This is a photo of Bob and Sally on their camping trip”) and therefore not accessible.

What we’d like to do is require users to re-enter the image title upon uploading it–in other words, we don’t want the Title field to auto-fill with the image file name–so they are forced to consider using meaningful text to describe the image before saving it to the database.

I know this would probably have to be done with a hack, but so far myself and another programmer have not been able to find the file or source code to do this. We’ve managed to customize the rest of the system to suit our needs, but this accessibility issue keeps tripping us up.

Does anyone know where we’d start? Or if someone else has already developed a plugin to do something similar? Or are we out of luck entirely?

If this isn’t in the right place, please let me know, and thanks for any insight you can offer!