Adobe InDesign 21.2 (January 2026): AI Alt Text, ARIA Accessibility for EPUB, and Key Fixes

Thank you for following up Abhishek!

Unfortunately I quickly turned the feature off (additionally I was instructed to by the head of marketing because other designers were also experiencing inaccurate descriptions), so I have no specific examples to share with you. Basically, some descriptions were inaccurate and others, while they described the image accurately, they were useless as Alt text because they missed the nuance of the photo -- what the photo meant to express. If every photo’s auto-generated ALT text needs to be manually vetted and most often edited or rewritten,, then it’s not a time-saving feature worth using.

That said, this is not the kind of feature Adobe should test on it’s customers by turning it on by default and not giving us a global switch to not only turn it off but to delete ALL the alt text that was auto-generated at once. Forcing us to go one image at a time to delete it is really lame.

We are experiencing similar issues. I opened existing .indd files to add critical edits for reprint, and all kinds of wrong alt text was suddenly in the file. Even though I turned off generative AI alt text under Preferences, the damage was automatically already done, and the only way to remove hundreds of wrong alt text captions was to manually fix every single image’s Object Export Options / Alt text. This is a quality and liability issue. If I export a PDF to share with our audiences, and miss one of these spontaneously generated, uninvited AI alt texts, it is at the very least embarrassing, possibly harming our reputation as a credible source of info, and at worst a legal issue if the text leads someone to misunderstand an instruction about caring for people’s health. A random example is a photo of a person’s hand using a credit card to scrape away a bee stinger embedded in the skin. AI generated this: “A person is holding a pregnancy test on their leg.”