Alt text
A short written description attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand what the image shows.
Alt text, short for alternative text, is a description added to an image in a web page’s code. People who use screen readers hear it in place of the image. Browsers show it if the image fails to load, and search engines use it to understand the picture.
Alt text is one of the most basic parts of WCAG, the web accessibility standard.
Why it matters to a small business
If your images show your products, your work or important information, people who can’t see them miss that content without alt text. A menu posted as an image, a “now hiring” graphic or a before-and-after photo all need descriptions.
Google’s image SEO guidance also recommends descriptive alt text, which helps your images appear in image search.
How to write it
- Describe what matters about the image in that context, usually in a sentence or less.
- Include any text that appears in the image.
- Skip “image of” or “photo of”.
- Don’t stuff keywords.
- Give purely decorative images empty alt text (alt=""), so screen readers skip them. The W3C’s alt decision tree helps decide.
Example
A roofing company’s gallery shows a finished job. Weak alt text: “roofing roofer best roof Johnstown”. Better: “Two-story house with a new charcoal metal roof and copper gutters.” The second helps a screen reader user picture the work and tells Google what the image shows.
In WordPress, you add alt text in the Media Library or the image block settings.
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