Understanding Alternative Text and its Importance

Your business’ website is the digital gateway to your company and, therefore, should be the first thing to start with when adopting accessible technology practices.

Web accessibility refers to ensuring that websites can be used by every user, regardless of their personal abilities, the technical characteristics of the equipment from which they connect, or their computer skills. It is a fight against digital inequality and providing people with disabilities the same opportunities that others benefit from.

Adding images and other graphics is one of the important things you can do to make your website accessible and is a core aspect to consider when designing a website. The more images, illustrations, charts, drawings, etc., you add to your web content, the more comprehensible it becomes for people with disabilities. And to make those images accessible to the low-visioned or the blind, you need to provide alternative text to them.

But how to do it? What other factors to consider?

Alternative Text in Images and Transcripts in Videos

When using multimedia content on your website due to accessibility issues, it is important that you go one step further. An alternative text is the text attribute given to all non-text elements within your website (such as images, video, and audio content) that describes their content so that visually impaired people can understand them (they must be appropriately tagged in Meta descriptions).

For images, always add an alternative text (alt) that describes the image. In this way, even if the user cannot see it, they will be able to understand it with the information you are providing from the title.

You can edit this information in WordPress each time you upload an image to the gallery or by going to Media. There you can write the alt for each photo. In addition, this also favors you for SEO because it helps to position your site on the search engine rankings.

As for the videos, it is important that you add captions and transcripts. If you don’t use them, you don’t need them, but if you do, these captions or transcripts will be of great help to people with disabilities. This way, you make the videos accessible to everyone.

Importance of Alternative Text in Terms of Accessibility

As discussed above, screen readers can access alt texts to help visually impaired people who might not otherwise know the content of an image. This simple description improves the user experience of many browsers, expanding the reach of your web page.

For example, if you have a clothing brand, adding alt texts to the product images on your website will enable people with visual disabilities to find out the content of the images and expand the garments description information.

In addition to helping visually impaired surfers, alt text allows the browser to give context to images that fail to load or that are not found on the web. In this way, the browser can have a general context of the image even when they cannot access it. This text will appear next to an image icon where the visual resource would be and is found on all types of pages, including social media images.

Its benefits are summarized in the following points:

It provides information to reading software used by visually impaired users.
It helps in the organic positioning of your website through the use of keywords.
It gives search engines an easy way to understand the content of an image.
It provides an image description when a page does not load correctly.

What makes a Good ALT Attribute?

For alt-text to make your website and its content accessible to people with disabilities, it must be well-thought-out and well-written. Ultimately, the text should be specific to and representative of the theme of the web page it supports visually.

Here are some keys for you to write the best alternative texts within your SEO strategy:

Describe the image and be specific. Use the subject and context of the image to guide you.
Don’t start with “Image of”. It describes directly since Google and reading software already know that it is an image thanks to the HTML code.
Limit alt text to 100 characters. Reading software cuts off alt text after this number of characters. If it is longer, verbalizing it to visually impaired users is difficult.
Use your keywords, but sparingly. Include your article’s main keyword in the alt text only if it flows naturally. If not, use the most relevant semantic keywords or terms within a long-tail keyword. For example, if the main keyword of your article is “clothing for winter”, you can use “winter clothing” in the alt text.
Don’t force your keyword into the alt text for each image. If you added several images in the body of the text, add your keyword in at least one of them, especially in the one that you think is more representative. Make different and attractive descriptions in the secondary images.
You need to add alt text to simple images that contain content-related information, complex images such as maps, graphs, charts, etc., logos, decorative images that do not provide any valuable information, and images in the image gallery.

The important point to remember is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to making alt text. Every image on your website needs a different alt text to make it accessible to all users.

We hope the information we shared has helped you understand the importance of alt text in improving the accessibility of a website. Indeed, alt text is the most important factor to consider and the best investment when creating a website to make it accessible to all. Whether you’re creating your website from scratch or doing an update, revise and adapt it to make it more accessible.