VISION
ALT-TEXT envisions a digital environment shaped by the humans that use it.
A world where technology is accessible, useful and facilitates shared realities, creativity, and meaningful participation on the web.
A digital environment where:
- People have choice – participation is not defined by extraction and opacity,
- Communities have a say in the systems that shape their lives – not surveillance and authoritarian censorship
- infrstructure serves the public interest – not power and capital concentrated in the hands of the few
MISSION
ALT-TEXT wants to share knowledge and empower citizens to act and participate on the web. We work across three levels:
- People: Helping people to uderstand, navigate and shape technology
- Community: Strengthening communities and organisations working with them to be in control of technology
- Infrastructural: Advocating for policies that mean critical public infrastructure distributes power instead of concentrating it in the hand of the few.
To achieve this our work connects critical digital and media literacy, digital autonomy and public-interest advocacy.
VALUES
Agency
We believe people have the right not just to be protected from digital harm, but to understand, question and control the systems shaping their lives.
Clarity
Complexity is often used to keep people out of decisions that affect them. We translate – between technical systems and everyday experience, between policy language and citizen impact – because understanding is the precondition for power.
Technology as a common resource
We reject the idea that the internet is primarily a commercial space to be navigated defensively. It is a shared infrastructure for creativity, participation, culture and democratic life. We work to make that version of the web more accessible and more real.
Rigour without hierarchy
We ground our education and advocacy in evidence and research. But expertise does not belong only to institutions – the lived experience of people navigating digital harm is knowledge, and we take it seriously.
Independence
We take no money from commercial platforms, advertising, or political parties. Our analysis goes where the evidence leads. This is not a footnote – it is the condition under which everything else we do is credible.
Solidarity
Digital harm is not evenly distributed. Older people, people with less digital experience, and those with fewer resources to defend themselves bear a disproportionate share of the risk. Our work starts there.
THEORY OF CHANGE
Surveillance capitalism has made exploitation the default condition of digital life. Ordinary people – especially older citizens, people with less digital experience, and those with fewer resources – are systematically targeted by scams, manipulative design, opaque algorithms and data extraction. Most people do not have the knowledge to recognise these harms, let alone resist them. And the organisations that could push back – civil society groups, advocacy organisations, educators – often lack the capacity to communicate about technology effectively to the publics they serve.
Meanwhile, the policy decisions that will define digital rights for a generation are being made now: the AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the European Media Freedom Act, the Digital Fairness Act, net neutrality, copyright, GDPR enforcement. Citizens are largely absent from those debates – not because they don’t care, but because no one has connected the harms they experience daily to the structural choices being made in Brussels.
Citizen education. We produce practical, accessible courses and content that help people – starting with older citizens – recognise scams, protect their data, understand their rights, and engage with digital tools safely and confidently. We also create content that opens up the more expansive possibilities of digital life: creativity, participation, cultural expression, and digital sovereignty.
Civil society capacity. We work with CSOs, advocacy organisations and educators to help them communicate about technology clearly and effectively – building campaigns, producing materials, and sharing expertise so that the organisations closest to affected communities can act.
Policy advocacy. We use what we learn from citizens and civil society to inform and support advocacy on the issues that matter: platform accountability, algorithmic transparency, data protection, AI regulation, and the broader legislative framework shaping the European digital environment.
An older person who learns to spot a scam becomes harder to exploit. A CSO that can explain algorithmic harm to its members becomes a more effective advocate. A policymaker who hears consistent, well-evidenced pressure from an informed public makes better decisions. ALT-TEXT works at all three levels because change at any one level without the others is fragile. Citizen education without policy change leaves people defending themselves against systems that are structurally designed to harm them. Policy advocacy without citizen grounding loses its democratic legitimacy. Civil society capacity-building without both is just communications training.
The connective tissue is critical thinking – the habit of asking who built this system, for whose benefit, and what would it look like if it worked for people instead.
Citizens across Europe are better equipped to protect themselves and exercise their digital rights. Civil society organisations working on digital issues have stronger communications capacity. Policymakers in Brussels hear a consistent, citizen-grounded voice on the issues that define the digital environment. And ALT-TEXT has built a sustainable model that keeps the connection between lived harm and systemic change visible and legible.