The project

A combination of the IDEA Act and the end-of-life for Drupal 7 gave US space agency NASA the chance to reconsider the CMS they were using for nasa.gov. WordPress agency Lone Rock Point led the development and implementation in WordPress, which would end up supporting 456 CMS users, 68,698 migrated pages, and 3,023 new landing pages.

Images are one of the key ways NASA tells its story, which includes some of the most iconic photographs in human history: ‘Image of the Day’ is one of the highest-traffic parts of the organisation’s site. One of the things on NASA’s wishlist was the ability to use their own image library repository to catalogue, manage and ensure attribution and accessibility for their images.

Efficiency and safeguards for NASA’s content creators

As a US government agency, NASA is subject to federal accessibility, disclosure, and accreditation rules. With between 50-100 articles and hundreds of images being uploaded every month, NASA’s teams needed an effective, efficient way to keep track of the metadata attached to each unique image. 

At the time, content creators had to take around five steps to ensure images were compliant; from sourcing the image to adding alt text, it was a laborious task that could result in duplicate images or missing information due to a lack of safeguards in the editorial process.

Adding to the team’s frustration was the limitations of AI-powered solutions for image management: with an image library like NASA’s, where very specific, scientific-level information is required, AI tools all failed to identify the necessary distinctions between planets, stars, and other out-of-this-world phenomena. 

Reducing the risk of accumulating media assets without the proper accessibility data applied, and ensuring that authors can’t fall foul of rules by accident, was key. The team was also keen to remove the pressure and expectation to concentrate on imagery so that authors could focus on scientific editorial content elements.