Tennessee just made an invisible update to its tourism site—and it’s brilliant

If you’ve ever been to a Nashville honky-tonk, you’ve witnessed the chorus of cowboy boots, the thrumming acoustic guitars, the roadhouse neon, the Stetsons, the buoyant bourbon-and-barbecue-fueled energy.

You probably wouldn’t describe this scene as simply “a bar.” And yet, if you’re blind or have low vision and happen to use a screen reader to read the alt text of a photo of a honky-tonk, that’s likely the description you would get: “This is an image of a bar.” 

“The current [state of alt text] is pretty abysmal, just to be quite candid. It’s almost a bit ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ literally and figuratively,” says Josh Loebner, creative marketing agency VML’s global head of inclusive design, who also happens to be blind. “Images create another layer of depth to what narrative is on a website, regardless of what it is—but particularly for travel and tourism.”

This led VML and the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development to launch Sound Sites—an initiative to replace the alt text on the state’s official tourism website with lyrical verse from one of Tennessee’s best natural resources: songwriters.

Now, no longer is a photo of King’s Palace Cafe in Memphis “an image of a person playing guitar in a bar.” Rather, as songwriters David Tolliver and Billy Montana put it:

There’s blues singing off
the strings of Lucille,
Ringing down the black top
and sidewalks of Beale,
The soul of BB King is
present and real,
The songs seem to find you
and know how you feel.

Tuning up

Often, Loebner says, accessible design is regarded as a matter of “checking the box.” It’s treated as an afterthought that doesn’t involve any semblance of creativity. But alt text is competing with vivid sensorial power. When someone sees a photo, “in an instant, they not only distill the information, but in travel and tourism, it starts to put them in that place . . . them stepping into those mountains, walking a trail where they can have a beautiful scenic vista, or sitting in front of a stage hearing an artist play their favorite song,” he says. 

It takes creativity to bring an image to life in the truncated space of descriptive text, which best practices place at around 125 characters. If there’s a group of people who excel at working in those tight borders, it’s songwriters. Loebner acknowledges that VML could have hired copywriters, but the state’s heritage of songwriters was too perfect an opportunity to pass up.

“Our tagline for the state is “Sounds Perfect.” And if you think about it, if an image doesn’t have an alt text associated with it, it really doesn’t sound perfect to people who are blind or partially sighted,” Loebner says. “A songwriter, at their core, is about putting words together in very evocative, sublime ways that really nobody else can do.”

Loebner says when VML brought the idea to Tennessee officials roughly six weeks ago, they loved it. So far they’ve worked with a dozen songwriters, including Kix Brooks of the musical duo Brooks & Dunn; the aforementioned David Tolliver (who has written for the likes of Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd, and others) and Billy Montana (Garth Brooks, Sara Evans); and Hilary Williams (granddaughter of country music legend Hank Williams Sr.). VML paired them with people from the blind communities to collaborate, converse, and help get a sense of the challenges and barriers of generating image descriptions for alt text. 

“Pun intended, it opened up the songwriters’ eyes to seeing how their verse could be used in quite a unique way that hadn’t been considered before,” Loebner says.

Noodling around on their instruments, the songwriters have added lyrical alt text to several hundred images, with the hope of reaching a thousand as a benchmark. And while this all makes for a great PR/marketing story for VML and the state, it’s one that reaches far beyond the initial buzz. Loebner says the goal is to expand the scope of the project, continuing to recruit songwriters to create alt text for a variety of uses, from social campaigns to video ads and more. 

AN ACCESSIBLE SOLUTION

The project has been dubbed a first of its kind for the tourism industry. And that tracks: Loebner says accessible design is often regarded as an insurmountable mountain, where everything must be done in one fell swoop across the board. But he believes that any element of progress is progress. He adds that it’s also thought to be time-consuming and expensive, but as this project shows, it can be done quickly. “I can guarantee it will not break any bank of any travel or tourism department,” he says.

Of course, weak image descriptions are an issue in most industries, and song lyrics obviously aren’t a universal panacea. Image descriptions at large just need to be more evocative about telling stories in a succinct way for the benefit of all—and Sound Sites serves as a powerful reminder that innovative solutions are needed for a potent problem.

Loebner says 93% of all websites have at least one page that doesn’t include any descriptive text, and many others lack quality image descriptions, if they have them at all. Which can be utterly detrimental to not just planning a vacation—but major life decisions at large. 

“Think about a young person who is considering college, and they’re blind and they want to know what college to go to. If that college doesn’t have accessible websites or immersive alt text, then that college may be passed over. Or think about different careers,” he says. “We all want to dream. And when there’s inaccessibility as a barrier, that could diminish dreams. We want to be able to open the aperture, to hopefully allow everybody, whether they’re blind or not, to be able to dream bigger.”