#311 2025 · Tennessee Department of Tourist Development · Tourismreframe
Tennessee's tourism board, working with VML and a dozen Nashville songwriters including Dolly Parton, rewrote the alt text on TNVacation.com as song lyrics, turning a legally-mandated accessibility checkbox into content sighted visitors seek out too
the problem
Alt text for blind users is a flat legal checkbox nobody enjoys
background
Web accessibility law requires alt text so screen readers can describe images to blind and low-vision users. In practice nearly every organization treats this as pure compliance overhead: a flat, literal caption like 'image of a lake at sunset' written by whoever is cheapest, read once by a screen reader and never thought about again. The requirement exists to avoid legal exposure, not to communicate anything worth hearing.
Tennessee's tourism website, TNVacation.com, faced the same obligation for its landscape and destination photography. Rather than outsource the task to a compliance vendor, the state's tourism department and its agency VML treated the alt text itself as the creative brief — asking what accessibility could look like if it were written by people who write for a living, for an audience whose only channel into the image is language.
the move
The Tennessee Department of Tourist Development and agency VML recruited about a dozen Tennessee songwriters — including Dolly Parton, Kix Brooks, and blind singer-songwriter JP Williams — to co-write the alt text for images on TNVacation.com as lyrical, sensory verse instead of flat literal captions, so screen-reader users encounter narrative and music rather than a checkbox description ('Sound Sites', launched April 2025).
the payoff
The project produced hundreds of songs of alt-text verse across the site, drew enthusiastic feedback from blind and low-vision users and disability-advocacy press, and won a 2025 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award in the accessibility category; VML has since published a public toolkit to help other tourism boards write emotionally rich alt text. Honest caveat: no publisher has released hard traffic, conversion, or screen-reader-session numbers — the documented evidence is qualitative acclaim and one juried award, not measured engagement lift.
what came after
Tennessee is folding Sound Sites into its next full site redesign, and VML is positioning the approach as a reusable accessibility-as-content model for other destination marketers.
references
- [1]Tennessee Tourism Rewrites Accessibility with Music-Driven Alt TextTennessee Department of Tourist Development (tn.gov), 2025tn.gov
- [2]Inclusive 'Sound Sites' Tennessee Tourism Campaign Makes Creative Use Of Alt-TextMediaPost, 2025mediapost.com