Visua11y, a project led by accessibility expert Anne-Mieke Bovelett, has won the top prize at this year’s CloudFest Hackathon with a working solution to a widespread but often overlooked accessibility challenge: making infographics usable for everyone.

Built in just three days, the plugin automatically converts complex visuals into accessible alternatives. Bovelett plans to submit it to the WordPress.org repository and says it has already caught the attention of potential investors interested in supporting its long-term future—though she’s open to speaking with more.

“I wasn’t thinking about getting any awards,” Bovelett told The Repository, though she admitted to wanting the ‘Social Media Master Award’ and media coverage to highlight the important issue. “I just wanted to get it done—and for the whole world to understand the importance of accessible infographics.”

Addressing a critical gap in accessibility

Infographics—sizing charts, train maps, sales diagrams—are everywhere online, yet they’re often inaccessible to people who rely on assistive technologies or struggle to process visual information.

“In our daily life, we run into infographics all the time,” Bovelett said. “One of the most notorious places is Amazon. Sellers don’t have much room for text, so they solve this with graphics—tables of shoe sizes, clothing sizes, and more. But these infographics, used millions of times, aren’t accessible.”

Making visuals like these accessible usually requires manually coding the information—an often time-consuming task many content creators aren’t equipped to handle.

Visua11y reduces this process to just two clicks, using AI-powered OCR to extract and format data from images.

“On the first click, the AI reads the information and outputs it,” Bovelett explained. “You can review it, correct any issues, and then with the second click, it’s done.”

While Visua11y came together in three days at the Hackathon, Bovelett and fellow project lead Nina Jameson, from Gehirngerecht Digital, had already laid much of the groundwork beforehand.

“We came well prepared,” Bovelett said. “We had GitHub ready, a Kanban board, the use cases, and tickets. We even started thinking about the website.”

Still, Bovelett was surprised by how far the team got by the weekend’s end.

“I thought all we were going to do was get these bright minds together and start building documentation,” she said. “Instead, I woke up on Sunday morning and I saw that Jakob Trost, who is the CTO of GREYD, wrote a message at 1 a.m. and he said, ‘Go and test. Here’s the plugin.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And yeah, so it just worked.”

Multiple awards—and a meaningful win

Alongside the overall prize, Visua11y collected several other honors, including the Breaking Barriers Award, second place for both the Social Media Master and Dream Team Awards, and third place in the Pitch Perfect Award.

For Bovelett, the win marked her second in a row. Last year, her team took home the top prize for Can everyone use ____?, another project focused on accessibility.

“Honestly, I cried,” she said. “I didn’t expect it because there were 10 outstanding projects at the Hackathon. There was not one project this year that didn’t deserve to be there.”

The jury—made up of experts from Automattic, Google, Yoast, TYPO3, and other organizations—praised Visua11y for delivering a functional, installable tool in just three days.

“The most interesting projects were those with an immediate tangible outcome, like Accessible Infographics,” said Marvin Altemeier, a jury member from Hetzner. “You can install it right away and use it instantly on your website.”

Full results from CloudFest Hackathon 2025

• #CFHack2025 Overall Winner (Sponsored by Greyd)
  1. Accessible Infographics (Visua11y)
  2. WP-CLI as an MCP Host
  3. Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework

• Tech Visionary Award (Sponsored by Hostinger)
  1. Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework
  2. WP-CLI as an MCP Host
  3. Securing the Supply Chain for OSS

• Dream Team Award (Sponsored by Omnisend)
  1. Peer-to-Peer Federated RAG Framework
  2. Accessible Infographics (Visua11y)
  3. Federated Community Events

• Social Media Master Award (Sponsored by Kinsta)
  1. WP-CLI as an MCP Host
  2. Accessible Infographics (Visua11y)
  3. WordPress Staging Environment Manager

• Pitch Perfect Award (Sponsored by Codeable)
  1. Tie: CMS Freedom & Securing the Supply Chain for OSS
  2. 3rd Place: Visua11y

• Breaking Barriers Award (Sponsored by Automattic)
  1. Accessible Infographics (Visua11y)
  2. WP-CLI as an MCP Host
  3. AIccessiblity Content Updater

What’s next?

Bovelett plans to submit Visua11y to the WordPress.org plugin repository as a free plugin, with a premium version already on the roadmap to support bulk processing and other advanced features. The team is also finalizing the onboarding process, allowing users to connect their own API keys and start using the plugin. Extensive documentation is also available describing how the team created Visua11y so other developers can build it into their own platforms.

The project has already attracted early interest from investors as Bovelett looks to secure funding to support long-term development and move beyond the typical volunteer-driven open-source model.

Visua11y’s momentum could break a pattern CloudFest Hackathon Head Carole Olinger is hoping to change—one where promising projects often lose steam once the Hackathon wraps. While past successes like Domain Connect and WordPress Playground show what’s possible, too many projects have struggled to stay alive after the event.

To change that, the Hackathon has expanded its post-event support this year, adding mentorship, media partnerships, and follow-up tracking to ensure projects like Visua11y stay on course.

With a working MVP, industry interest, and a clear roadmap, Visua11y is on track to become one of the Hackathon’s next standout success stories.

Explore the project at visua11y.org.

The Repository is a proud media partner of CloudFest Hackathon 2025.

Feature image credit: Roan de Vries.