Minnesota Lottery AI-Powered Accessibility

The challenge

Resolve a compliance gap and improve website accessibility by addressing over 7,800 missing alt text descriptions—a near-impossible task for our client’s marketing team to fix manually.

The Minnesota Lottery faced a critical accessibility challenge that put their compliance efforts at risk. Their website, managed through CraftCMS, was flagged by tools like SiteImprove and Lighthouse for missing alt text descriptions on over 7,800 images. Addressing this gap was essential for improving accessibility scores and meeting legal and ethical obligations. However, manually creating alt text for each image would have required 260 hours—a significant investment of their marketing team’s time. They needed a solution that was fast, efficient, and sustainable.

What we did

• Conducted research and testing to explore and validate AI solutions for alt text generation.
• Integrated a third-party AI tool with CraftCMS using specialized plugins to automate alt text creation.
• Enhanced AI-generated descriptions by incorporating custom contextual instructions via ChatGPT to align with the Lottery’s unique content.
• Streamlined workflows to automatically generate alt text for new image uploads, future-proofing accessibility efforts.

Outcomes

This solution resolved a major compliance gap but also serves as a proof-point for the Lottery’s marketing team to continue embracing AI with confidence. What started as an operational fix to improve accessibility now feeds an appetite for further innovation, positioning the Lottery to explore AI’s broader potential in content creation and beyond.