What is alt text?

My clients are the best. They do great things in the community. Like really great things. Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, providing a broad array of cultural and arts education and entertainment, caring for our children, and so much more. They work hard every day. So they don’t have time for things like alt text.

What  is alt text?

Have you ever opened an email or a web page and you get these weird looking things where images should be? It might look something like this email:

email with no images showing

See how there’s that weird icon that looks like image icon and then “Cover of Chattanooga…” text? That weird icon is telling you there should be an image there.

If you were to look at this email with the images showing, you’d see this:

email showing images

See how in the first image, the text “Cover of Chattanooga …” describes the image that you can see in the second image? That is called the alt text.

Alt text exists for two main reasons:

  1. For people with visual impairment it describes the image they would be seeing if they weren’t visually impaired. People with total visual impairment use screen readers to view email and website pages and these screen readers read the alt text out loud to them.
  2. For web pages, it helps search engine crawlers determine what type of content is on the page and helps that page be better indexed for search results.

So a simple thing you can do when building email marketing campaigns or web pages with images is to properly give each image appropriate alt text. This not only helps your content be accessible to all viewers, it helps search engines find your content and improves your search engine results.

You don’t want alt text to be ridiculously long or non-descriptive and too short. Simply describe it in about 125 characters or less. Examples: “slice of chocolate birthday cake,” “boy sitting on a swing,” “mason jar full of sharpened pencils,” etc. It’s tempting in a rushed moment of building emails or web pages to skip this part and leave it blank (I am admittedly guilty of this). But it’s better for everyone if you take just a few seconds and fill in the alt text. You’ll end up with richer content and better search results.