Content clarity
Content clarity measures how much of your image alt text, link text and button labels actually describes what it points to. It is the difference between “Read our 2026 accessibility report” and “Click here”. Both pass the automated rules; only one of them is useful to somebody who cannot see the page.
It does not detect AI-generated content
The check is performed by AI; it is not a check for AI. Inclusify makes no attempt to work out whether you wrote your content yourself, and a low score says nothing about how your content was produced, only that some of it is not descriptive enough to be useful.
Why it matters
A screen reader announces alt text, link text and button labels out loud, often stripped of the surrounding page. When a visitor pulls up a list of every link on the page, which is a normal way to navigate, a page full of “here”, “more” and “read on” becomes unusable. An image whose alt text reads “image1.jpg” or “banner” is announced as exactly that.
WCAG covers this under 1.1.1 Non-text Content and 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context). Both are Level A. Automated rule engines can only check that alt text and link text exist. Whether the words are meaningful is a judgement call, which is why this check exists.
What gets checked
- Image alt text. The image itself is looked at alongside its alt text, so the two can be compared. Decorative images that are correctly marked as decorative are left alone.
- Link text. Judged together with the link’s destination, so a short label that is accurate for where it goes is accepted.
- Button labels. The visible text, or the accessible name when the button is icon-only.
Product names, page names, brand names and short-but-accurate alt text all count as descriptive. The check is deliberately biased towards passing: when a label is borderline, it is left alone rather than flagged.
How the score is calculated
Every image, link and button on the page is collected, each one is judged individually, and the score is the share that came back descriptive:
So a page with 40 images, links and buttons where 6 were flagged scores 85. Nothing is weighted by severity, and the score is not blended into your accessibility score. It sits beside it as a separate number.
On a full-site crawl the site-wide figure is the average of the per-page scores, counting only pages where something was actually checked. Pages with no images, links or buttons to judge get no score rather than a zero, and the score is hidden entirely rather than shown as 0 when nothing on the page could be checked.
On very image-heavy pages a sample of images is judged rather than all of them, and repeated template images, such as the same product-tile pattern across a catalogue, are judged once and reported as a group, with the number of affected images shown on the finding.
What a good score looks like
- 90–100. Healthy. Expect a handful of flagged items on any real site; chase them when convenient.
- 70–89. Worth a pass. Usually one repeated pattern, such as a product tile or an icon button used site-wide, accounting for most of the flags.
- Below 70. A systemic problem. Typically auto-generated alt text from a CMS or filenames used as alt text. Fixing the template that produces them usually moves the score a long way in one change.
How it relates to the automated checks
Content clarity is an extra layer on top of the automated WCAG rule checks that InclusifyBot runs. It does not replace them, and it does not change your accessibility score. The rule engine finds missing alt attributes, unlabelled controls, contrast failures and the rest; this check reads what is there and asks whether the words do their job.
Both are needed for the same reason: an automated engine can prove an attribute is absent, but it cannot tell you that “photo” is a useless description of a photo. Neither replaces testing with real assistive technology; see the compliance guide for where the line sits.
When you disagree with a finding
Dismiss it. A dismissed finding stops counting against the score and does not come back for the same content on later scans, so you are not re-arguing the same label every week. Findings carry a suggested replacement where one can be written. Treat it as a starting point, since only you know the context the element sits in.