Accessibility alt text bot

Accessibility-alt-text-bot

This action supports accessible content sharing on GitHub by leaving an automated reminder whenever an image is shared on a GitHub Issue, Pull request, or Discussion without meaningful alternative text (alt text). Alternative text helps convey the context of the image to those who use assistive technologies such as a screen reader and removes accessibility barriers.

For guidance on setting alternative text, see Alternative text for images on Primer.

Images on GitHub default to using the filename as alt text. This action flags when the alt text has not been updated from the default:

Screenshot of an automated actions comment on a GitHub issue that says, 'Uh oh! @monalisa, the image you shared is missing helpful alt text...' and contains instructions for setting alt text

Note: Ordinarily, setting alt="" will mark images as decorative. However, GitHub currently renders all images as a link. To avoid rendering links with no names, we recommend always setting alt text on images in GitHub.

How to add this action to your repo

Copy this workflow into any repo you want the accessibility-alt-text-bot to run in.

name: Accessibility-alt-text-bot
on: 
  issues:
    types: [opened, edited]
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, edited]
  issue_comment:
    types: [created, edited]
  discussion:
    types: [created, edited]

jobs:
  accessibility_alt_text_bot:
    name: Check alt text is set on issue or pull requests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: ${{ github.event.issue || github.event.pull_request || github.event.discussion }}
    steps:
      - name: Get action 'github/accessibility-alt-text-bot'
        uses: github/accessibility-alt-text-bot