An introduction to social media's Alt Text!

In a Hypertext Markup Language page [HTML], alt text (alternative text) is a word or phrase that can be used as an attribute to describe an image's nature or contents to website users. In a box that typically would have the image in it, the alt text is displayed instead. When an image link is unavailable due to a broken or modified URL or another problem, alt text can be helpful. An alt attribute begins with the characters alt= and includes the alt text enclosed in quotation marks after that. The alt text for an image with an alt attribute often appears in a little box beneath the pointer in the majority of browsers. Even if no alt boxes are required, alt attributes must always be contained within image tags. A blank alt property should be added to the image element if the web page creator does not want an alt box to appear alongside an image. This will prevent a default character sequence that displays the picture's URL from appearing when the viewer hovers the cursor over the image.

There are a few factors that account for alt text's continued significance decades after its introduction.

Many users use voice readers even if your website loads because they are unable or unwilling to read the page aloud. People with visual impairments are the main beneficiaries of alt-text design.

When they crawl your photographs, search engines don't get the complete picture. It seems as though they understand the big picture but not the true meaning. Search engines cannot crawl text that is placed on an image, although they are becoming more intelligent!

One of the simplest methods to increase accessibility on your website is to include helpful alt text to photos. But understanding it isn't always simple, and if done incorrectly, it may even make accessibility worse. Bad (i.e., intrusive or incomprehensible) alt text is always inferior to no alt text. Here are some guidelines to help you do it correctly:

Describe the picture's content without being critical. Say what you see rather than assuming anything about a subject's motivations, gender, ethnicity, or what's going on out of frame. However, be as detailed as you can about what you can see. Including details about your skin tone, hair color and style, and other features will allow someone who cannot see the image to create a mental image.

If you can effectively include one or two top keywords in your description of an image, that's wonderful. Your SEO will benefit from this. However, only when done sparingly and honestly. Although contextually 'poor' (i.e., useless) alt text cannot be detected by search engines, keyword stuffing may result in a ranking penalty. Google can detect it! As a result, your main priority must be to briefly and specifically describe any photos that need alt text.

A person or a system will be able to tell when something they are accessing is alt text. Imagine how annoying it would be to use a screen reader on a page with plenty of images and have it say things like, "Image of the theater" or "Image of the front of house area." "Image of exterior signage," "Image of the ticketing staff," "Image of the theater," and "Image of the stage"... However, explaining the type of image—such as a headshot, illustration, chart, or screen grab—can be beneficial in assisting people to grasp the context.

Even while the quality and specificity of the alt text equally matter, the mere presence of alt text in the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code is preferable to no alt text in ensuring that an image is accessible.

Now you know what Alt Text is, how to write it, and how important it is for images and websites. Get started right now with Alt Text for your social media images. and schedule it to be published on RADAAR!