Pastedown: Making Alt Text a Natural Part of Content Creation

The Invisible Problem

Alt text is one of the most neglected aspects of web content. For screen reader users, an image without alt text is essentially invisible—or worse, read aloud as a meaningless filename like “IMG_4392.png.” Yet most content creators skip it, not out of malice, but because the friction is just high enough to make it easy to forget.

As someone who works on accessibility, I feel bad about this situation, but I also have to admit sometimes I skip alt text. Why?

Writing in Apple Notes and publishing to my personal blog meant converting rich text to Markdown every time. That process was already tedious: save each image to a folder, name it properly, insert the Markdown syntax, make sure the path is correct… By the time I got to alt text, it felt like an afterthought. Something I’d “get to later” but rarely did.

Editing is easier than creating from scratch

Then I realized: why not solve all these problems at once?

What if I could just copy and paste my content, and get a ready-to-go Markdown file—complete with tables, properly named image files, correct syntax, and automatically generated alt text?

The solution wasn’t to guilt creators into writing alt text. It was to make alt text appear automatically*, giving them a starting point to review and refine rather than a blank field to ignore.

Even an imperfect AI description prompts creators to engage with accessibility. For example, they might think, “Actually, this shows X, not Y” and make the edit. That’s infinitely better than an empty field. AI can also catch details sighted creators overlook, surfacing context that seems obvious visually but is crucial for those who can’t see the image.

Why Clipboard, Not Database?

iOS doesn’t allow apps to access Apple Notes’ data directly. Many developers would see this as a limitation to work around. I saw it as a feature.

By reading from the clipboard instead of a specific app’s database, Pastedown becomes platform-agnostic. Today I write in Apple Notes; tomorrow I might switch to Bear, Notion, or something new. The app doesn’t care—it works with any rich text source.

This also explains why I didn’t just build a mobile backend for my blog. I might run multiple sites on different frameworks. Not every project needs a CMS, especially in early stages. A clipboard-based tool gives me flexibility to adapt without rebuilding my publishing workflow from scratch.

Key Features

AI Alt Text Generation

Three options to match different needs and privacy preferences:

• Apple Vision (default): On-device analysis using iOS’s built-in Vision framework. Free, private, works offline.
• External API: Connect your own OpenAI or Claude API key for more sophisticated descriptions.
• Custom text: Set a fixed value for consistent styling.

Template System

For creators publishing to static site generators (Astro, Hugo, Jekyll), the template system handles the repetitive configuration:

Dynamic variables like {date}, {title}, or {clipboard_preview} let you define patterns for filenames and image paths. Flexible front matter supports multiple data types—text, dates, tags, lists—with options to comment out or indent fields.

The template system exists because I might publish to different sites with different requirements. One blog might need publishDate in ISO format; another might use date as a simple string. Rather than hardcoding any single format, I built the flexibility in from the start.

Smart Table Conversion

Apple Notes tables are notoriously difficult to parse—the standard APIs don’t expose cell positions. Pastedown uses a two-phase approach: extracting structure from raw RTF data, then mapping formatted content to the correct cells.

let encodings: [String.Encoding] = [
    .ascii, .utf8, .windowsCP1252, .macOSRoman, .isoLatin1
]

for encoding in encodings {
    if let decoded = String(data: rtfData, encoding: encoding),
       decoded.hasPrefix("{\\rtf") {
        return decoded
    }
}

Design & User Experience

The app supports both light and dark modes, with a clean, intuitive interface that gets out of your way.

Architecture

The app follows MVVM with separation between data models, business logic, and UI. The core RichTextProcessor handles conversion from NSAttributedString to Markdown, delegating specialized parsing to utility modules for tables, lists, and images.

pastedown/
├── Models/           # Template, FrontMatterField, ImageHandling
├── ViewModels/       # RichTextProcessor, ClipboardService, ImageAnalyzer
├── Views/            # SwiftUI components
├── Utilities/        # TableUtilities, ListUtilities, MarkdownUtilities
└── DesignSystem/     # Reusable UI components

What’s Next

• App Store release: Currently in TestFlight, preparing for public launch
• Shortcuts integration: Enable automation with iOS Shortcuts for one-tap conversion
• macOS companion: Bring the same workflow to desktop with batch processing support