WCAG reference → 1.1.1
1.1.1 Non-text Content (level A)
Anything that is not text — an image, a chart, an icon, a diagram — needs a text alternative that serves the same purpose.
How it shows up in Confluence
Confluence makes this easy to get wrong because pasting a screenshot never asks for a description. A page of numbered steps where each step is a screenshot is, to a screen-reader user, a page of numbered nothing. Diagrams are the harder case: the alternative has to carry the relationships the picture shows, not the fact that a picture exists.
What to do about it
Click the image, use the alt text option in the image toolbar, and write what a reader would lose if the image were removed. For a chart, that is the finding. For a screenshot, it is the state of the interface and what is highlighted. Genuinely decorative images — dividers, repeated brand marks — should be marked as decorative so they are skipped rather than described.
What Clearwren checks for this criterion
- Image has no alternative text — Screen-reader users get nothing but the word "image" where this picture is, so any information it carries is lost.
- Alternative text does not describe the image — Alt text like "image1.png" or "screenshot" tells a screen-reader user nothing about what the image shows.
- Alternative text starts with "image of" — Screen readers already announce that the element is an image, so the prefix is read out twice.
- Alternative text is very long — A screen reader reads alt text in one uninterrupted run, so anything past roughly 150 characters is hard to follow.
- Status lozenge has no readable text — A lozenge is announced by its text; with none, its colour is the only thing carrying the meaning and a screen reader conveys nothing.