What is Alt-Text and Why Should I Use It?

What is Alt Text? 

Alt Text (Alternative Text) is an accessibility must.

Images help us break up text on a website, and they help us tell a story. Whether they are images illustrating your text, or the main event on the page, they are important elements on our websites. People using screen readers to dictate the page to them, often miss out on important bits of information as their screen reader can not view and translate an image. Alt-Text is a short, simple description of an image that will be read out by a screen reader. Alt text is not only important for people using screen readers, it is also shown when an image can not load, so the viewer can see what that image was supposed to be.

Regardless of which content management system you use, adding ALT text to your images is always a best practice, and it can even help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

Why is it important?

"All UK Public Bodies, which includes parish, town, borough and city councils, must comply with the legal requirements to meet the accessible standards of their website.”

Alt text is not only helpful, it is a government requirement for accessibility. 

Many people use accessibility features to consume content from web pages. For example, if a partially sighted individual wants to gather information from your website, they will use a software that reads the information from a page, converts it to speech, and then reads out. A screen reader can read most elements of a website on its own, but for images, a screen reader needs to be told what to say. By adding Alt-Text to your images, you are giving the screen reader a description of  an image to help the consumer understand your site.

Everyone deserves to be able to retrieve information from websites, so accessibility features like Alt Text are important. 

Published: 30/03/2022 Published by: WJPS

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