NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Tourism boards like to play up their natural resources. Waterfalls, rolling hills, deserts, mountains—if it’s there, trust a tourism board to tout it.

In a little Tennessee two-step, the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development is leaning on natural resources of a different sort—songwriters—to introduce virtual visitors to its version of “America at Its Best.”

You see, Tennessee has been revamping its website to provide better image descriptions for blind communities. Typically, when a person uses a screen reader to read a website aloud, the technology struggles over the photos, reading limp descriptions like “person on bridge” or “mountains with trees and blue sky.”

Booooorrrriiiiing!

Tapping its deep well of songwriters, Tennessee is reimagining these descriptions.

Consider this “alt text” for an image of a monarch alighting on pink flowers: “Butterfly on a blood root wildflower blanket on the hill / The gentle Smoky Mountains smile on the valley serene and still / A warm breeze welcomes springtime, goodbye winter chill / Can’t you hear them calling? Always have, always will.”

Doesn’t that description—written by songwriters David Tolliver and Billy Montana—do a better job of describing gorgeous Gatlinburg?

Travel Tennessee via its “Sound Sites” at tnvacation.com. And please let us know if you find a screen reader with a Tennessee twang.

*This article appears in American Road® magazine, Volume 23, Number 4. Preview the issue.