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The blog and marketing copy on your website is not the only text that matters. Every effective site today must also use images, and images need alt text to reach their full potential.
Alt text — short descriptions of visual content — is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO), as web crawlers use it to understand graphics. However, it serves another purpose, too. Descriptive, helpful alt text is also a critical aspect of accessibility.
At least 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of vision impairment. Users with these conditions may need to use screen readers to navigate the web if their vision challenges are severe enough. Without informative alt text, those tools will fail to accurately describe images, limiting the experience for users who rely on them.
In some cases, a lack of alt text could lead to regulatory troubles. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires websites to be reasonably accessible. Given how prominent vision impairments are, support for screen readers is a major part of complying with this law.
While the ADA’s standards for websites are often vague, they specifically highlight alt text as a common barrier to accessibility. Consequently, failing to keep these descriptions accessible could result in costly violations.
As common as alt text is, it’s easy to get wrong. Here are seven guidelines to follow when writing helpful and accessible image descriptors.
Alt text must be highly specific. A description like “a bird” is too general to be useful to users, but something like “a Northern cardinal sitting on a green birdhouse” creates an image in people’s minds. Including more descriptive text will also make visualizations interpretable to search engines, which is crucial for appearing in voice searches.
Accessible alt text is also simple. While being descriptive is important, lengthy descriptions become less useful once they become overly wordy or complex. Alt text should be two sentences at most, and in most cases, a single sentence or phrase is best. You should also omit words like “a picture of” or “image of.”
Your exact length, level of detail and included descriptors will vary between contexts. Consider your audience and the surrounding content to determine what the alt text needs to say.
For example, e-commerce sales are gaining significant momentum, with online sales producing $5.7 trillion each year. As e-commerce gains popularity, the need for accurate and descriptive alt text in product imagery grows exponentially. By contrast, a picture of the same type of product in a more general blog post about a related hobby only needs a short, general description.
Even though alt text does not need to be a full sentence, it should adhere to punctuation rules. Put a period at the end, use commas to separate items in a series and capitalize the first word. Screen readers need this formatting to sound natural when reading them, and because 87.6% of screen reader users use these tools because of a disability, such support is crucial for accessibility.
Another important accessibility consideration is to leave out any unneeded demographic descriptors. Only mention race, age, gender or related factors when it’s important to the context or understanding of the image. Similarly, you should avoid subjective language, such as adjectives like “nice,” “pretty” or “bad.” These steps ensure your text remains inclusive and helpful.
All images need alt text, but not all visuals add informational value to your content. You may use something to separate lines of text or merely for visual interest.
In these cases, when the overall content remains unchanged by the meaning of the image, set the alt text as two quotation marks without anything between them. This will tell screen readers to ignore the graphic, whereas not including any alt text may make them read the file name out loud.
Finally, always check your alt text before publishing. The American Foundation for the Blind lists several screen readers you can experiment with to see how your descriptors sound in this kind of software. Anything that sounds unusual or takes too long to get through may require edits.
Every website today must be accessible. Support for screen readers and other tools common among users with disabilities is a key part of that accessibility. Consequently, every site needs helpful alt text for its visual content.
These seven steps will help you keep your alt text functional and accessible. When you do that, you get one step closer to creating a site that works for everyone.
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