The Add Alternate Text to Image Feature
This feature guides you through a list of images without alternative text and gives you the chance to enter the right text describing the image.
Why Do Images Need Alternative Text Anyway?
Sure- without pixels, there’s no image. Without the image, there’s no meaning. But for the visually impaired customer's images mean zilch and pixels mean nothing to the search engine bots. The blind customers and the bots require a text description of the image to get its meaning. Visually impaired visitors use screen readers that read the text attached to an image aloud for them. Search bots crawl through a site reading text and ranking it accordingly.
Even though most browsers will display images perfectly fine without a text description, failing to add alt text not only makes the page non-valid, but also inaccessible to visually impaired users and non-friendly to search engines like Google.
Without alt text, the site ignores a potential customer base. Without alt text, the site snubs the search bots and its rankings pay the price. So add an alternative description to an image or area tag using the alt attribute. Better yet, complement it with a longdesc attribute, which points to a more comprehensive description.
The Solution
In a perfect world, alt descriptions are included with the image during the design process. In the real world, you have legacy sites to update or sites that need to be valid long after the design process ended. And you’re probably not looking forward to it.
Use this feature to find every image without an alternative description. The
feature guides you through a list and gives you the chance to enter the right text describing the image.
The before and after…
Remember, you’re taking the time to add alt descriptions for two good reasons- improving accessibility and giving the search bots text to crawl. Here’s what you should know about writing alt text descriptions:
- Write the alternative description accurately and succinctly to communicate the purpose of the image.
- Check your spelling and use punctuation when appropriate.
- Provide alternative text for both the main image and the hot spots of image maps.
- Do not repeat the description of an image in the adjacent text because the visually impaired don’t need to hear it twice.
- Do not use a list of keywords or tags as your alt description. Search bots look for this and it will hurt your SEO.
- Empty descriptions are acceptable in some cases if "this image conveys no meaning". "Spacer gifs” is a perfect example, but “no description” means you forgot or don’t care.
Learn more about adding alt text to images at: