Tiled Gallery: Screen reader announces ARIA label instead of alt text

[alinclamba]

Impacted plugin

Jetpack

Quick summary

A user performing manual accessibility checks with JAWS 2025 and SiteImprove reports that images in Tiled Galleries do not announce their alt text to screen readers. Instead, screen readers read the automatically generated ARIA label (e.g., “Open image 1 of 3 in full-screen”). This behavior prevents screen reader users from hearing meaningful image descriptions and causes the site to fail accessibility audits.

The user wants to know if there is a way to remove or override the ARIA labels, so that alt text can be read instead.

They also tried adjusting the block code manually to bypass this, but it broke the gallery layout and changed the image URLs to start with i0.wp.com, even though they have not enabled Jetpack's Site Accelerator.

This was initially reported here: 9567890-zd-a8c

Steps to reproduce

The user reported that:

They created Tiled Galleries on their site and added alt text to the images.

When testing with JAWS 2025 and SiteImprove, the screen reader reads the ARIA label (e.g., “Open image 1 of 3 in full-screen”) instead of the alt text.

They attempted to adjust the gallery code in the editor to work around this, but doing so broke the layout and caused image URLs to use the Jetpack CDN (i0.wp.com), even though Image Accelerator is disabled.

Exact reproduction steps were not provided, but the issue appears to involve the interaction between Tiled Gallery markup, ARIA labels, and screen reader behavior.

Site owner impact

Fewer than 20% of the total website/platform users

Severity

Major

What other impact(s) does this issue have?

No response

If a workaround is available, please outline it here.

No response

Platform (Simple and/or Atomic)

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• [ ] 9567890-zen

[anomiex]

Some notes from looking into this:

• The label is directly added on the <img> in the block rendering JS.
• It used to say "image 1 of 3 in gallery" until #37792 (cc @coder-karen @monsieur-z). The previous message seems to have been there when the Tiled Gallery block was first added to Jetpack in 2019 (#11633).
  • I note we now get the "open image" text even if Carousel is disabled.
• The aria-label attribute gets saved into the post. It seems that if you really want you can go into the Code Editor and delete them from the HTML in the post, which makes the block display a "Block contains unexpected or invalid content" message in the editor but seems to still render correctly. 🤷

[coder-karen]

This is partially fixed here - https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/pull/43345 - the aria labels are now only added if Carousel is enabled as well. If not, then screen-readers should only be reading the alt text.