3: Adding Alt Text to Images

What is alternative text? 

Adding photos to your webpage or web document is an excellent way to liven up your content and make a page easier to understand, especially for users with cognitive disabilities. 

Alternative text, or alt text, makes those same images accessible to users with visual impairments and other disabilities. 

When a screen reader encounters an image, it will read the alt text aloud. Users with sight-related disabilities rely on these descriptions to understand the meaning and context of any visual content on a webpage.  

How do we write alt text? 

Good alt text succinctly describes the image. Ask yourself what information the image conveys and then describe that message in less than 100 characters. For example: 

Screen readers will automatically announce an image as an image, so you don’t need to add “picture of” or “image of.”  You should end the alt text with a period though — it causes screen readers to pause slightly, making for an easier reading experience.

Any text that is visible in the image (such as on a sign, poster or t-shirt) must also be included in the alternative text.  

If the content of an image cannot be fully conveyed using alt text, it must be accompanied by an accessible table or plain text that provides the same information. (That’s why we don’t recommend using infographics on UAlbany websites.)

Are there other benefits of alt text? 

Some users have poor or unstable internet. If they open a webpage and an image doesn’t load properly, the alt text will display instead.  

Search engines like Google also pull in this data, so using descriptive alternative text is one way to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of a website — making the website more likely to show up in search results. 

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