Alt text: good for accessibility, good for SEO

Alternative text is the short written description of an image. Screen reader users hear it in place of the picture, and search engines read it to understand what the image shows. One small habit serves both audiences, yet most sites get it wrong.

Describe the purpose, not the pixels

Good alt text conveys what the image means in context, not a literal pixel-by-pixel account. For a photo of a product in use, describe the product and what is happening, not “image” or the file name. Ask yourself: if the picture vanished, what words would do its job here?

Decorative images take empty alt text

Not every image needs a description. Purely decorative graphics that add no information should have empty alt text, so a screen reader skips them rather than reading noise. Knowing when to say nothing is part of doing this well.

Keep it concise and natural

A sentence is usually plenty. Do not stuff keywords, and do not start with “image of”, since assistive technology already announces that it is an image. Write the way you would describe the picture to someone on the phone.

It helps you get found

Well-written alt text is a quiet SEO win. It helps your images appear in image search and gives search engines more context about the page. The same words that include a blind visitor also help a search engine, which is a recurring theme in our work.

Every image on this site, including the screenshots in our work, carries meaningful alt text. If your site is full of undescribed images, start a project and we will put that right.