One of the great new accessibility features of Drupal 8 is the ability for site administrators to require that alt text be entered for images that are uploaded through an image field on a content type or other entity. 

So I've got a fresh new Drupal 8 install. Let's see how this works! 

I'm gonna click on Manage then Structure. I'm gonna head into the Content Types and let's manage the fields on Basic Page and add an Image field. This is an image that already exists in the system. So I'll just reuse it. And I'll give it a label of Image. Now I'll Save. And this will drop us into the image settings for Basic Page. 

Now, I don't need to require that this field be entered, but what I want to do is first, enable the Alt field. So, down at the bottom of this settings form, I'm going to check the box: Enable Alt Field. And now, I'm going to check the box: Alt Field Required. Just note that this Alt Field Required checkbox doesn't appear until you check the Enable Alt Field box. So now I'll Save the settings. 

Let's go to Content and add a piece of content for our Basic Page. I'll click the Add Content then Basic Page. I'll give this a title...and notice that first of all I'm not adding an image to the Body field using the image button here. We'll get to that in a moment. I'm going to use the image field that I've added that requires the alt text. 

I'll choose the file and what happens if I don't enter any alt text? I'll try and save and publish and I get a warning that says the field Alternate Text is required and it won't let me save this node. So, I need to add some text as alternate text and now I can save and publish. 

If I Inspect This Element and I'll make this nice and big here, here's the image tag, and here's our alt attribute populated with Drupal 8 Magic Eight Ball. So that seemed to work just fine! Close out of that. 

Now what happens if I try and add an image through CKEditor? Is the alt text required at that point? So I've clicked inside the body field and I'm going to click on this Image button. I'll choose a file, I'll just choose the same file again. Now, if I leave this alternate text blank and save. First of all, it let's me save it without entering alternate text. And then if I Save and Keep Published, it doesn't enforce the alternate text. 

So at this point, that's one thing to keep in mind. There's no enforcement of alternate text on images added in the Body field using CKEditor. It's only enforced on images added through an image field and only if you Enable the Alt Text and also Require the Alt Text. Both of those checkboxes have to be checked. So there might be some future development. This might be something to jump into in the Drupal 8 Issue Queue, if you want to see CKEditor enforce alternate text on images added in the body field. That might be a great contribution to try and get into Drupal 8. 

Thanks for watching and more on Drupal 8 accessibility features in future blog posts and screecasts. Thanks for watching!