Tennessee tourism board turned alt text into song lyrics

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 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).

Recruited songwriters like Dolly Parton to write alt text as lyrical verse, turning a compliance chore into narrative worth encountering for screen-reader users.

Screen-reader users' only channel into an image is language, so alt text is inherently a content opportunity.

Professional songwriters produced sensory, narrative descriptions instead of flat literal captions.

The creative alt text earned press and awards, giving Tennessee free marketing from a legal requirement.

The approach cost little extra since it only required better writing on text the site needed anyway.

Treat compliance requirements as content opportunities: invest real craft in a channel competitors minimize, and the obligation itself becomes marketing.

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.