I had installed pandoc from homebrew which installed 1.18.

Manually installed the latest release and it did indeed extract the alt text from the description field.

Thanks for your help!

On Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 2:45:30 PM UTC-5, Jesse Rosenthal wrote:

Drew Keller <drew.kel...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> writes:

> If the docx reader does indeed extract that element, how can it be included
> in the converted document?
>
> I'm converting docx to rst so maybe it is different, but I have set the
> description field in Word's "Alt Text" Description panel but the alt text
> and description text never comes through to the converted RST file.

It's a fairly recent feature -- what version of pandoc are you using?