Things to Consider While Writing Effective Alt Texts

Posted by Acadecraft Inc on April 22nd, 2021

An alt text is basically a short description of the images used in a webpage that is readable by the screen readers. The main aim of alt text is to help visually impaired audiences to understand the message that is being conveyed by the image.

In this blog, the expert alt-text writing service providers will briefly discuss the points to keep in mind while writing down the descriptions. Let us read the blog further to know more details about it.

1. Keep it short and simple

The experts of alt text writing services say that you must keep your alt text short and simple. You do not have to use extremely poetic language to describe the images. Remember the aim of the alt texts in mind. It is meant to convey the message of the image to visually impaired individuals through screen readers. It should be written in as simple language as the rest of the content.

2. Do not start the description with ‘picture of’ or ‘image of’

Remember that the alt texts will be read by the screen readers for visually challenged people. The screen reader automatically declares it as an ‘image’ before reading out the description. Therefore writing ‘a picture of’ or ‘image of’ is basically useless in the case of alt texts.

3. Apart from SEO, also keep your audience in mind

The most important objective of alt text is to convey the message or purpose of the image to visually disabled people. Therefore what matters more than SEO, in this case, is how well you describe your image according to your target audience. Alt texts should not be considered to boost up the SEO aspects of your website. Instead, it should serve the purpose of sharing information.

4. Alt text for decorative image

Often developers include visual elements in a webpage for decoration purposes such as a border or a line. In that case, an empty alt text attribute must be written in order to avoid any sort of confusion.

An empty attribute is written in this way: alt=”.

Adding an empty attribute to the alt text simply indicated the screen reader to skip that part. Hence, the user can have a great experience without any interruption.  

5. Being specific is not mandatory

Although the above-mentioned points might suggest you write down short, specific, and straightforward statements as your alt text description. However, here the expert alt-text writing service providers suggest that it is not always mandatory to express every minute detail of the image into your descriptive text. The ultimate goal is to communicate with your reader. You need to be specific only when it is needed and not otherwise.

 Being that said, here we have come to the end of this article. The above-mentioned points are extremely useful and beneficial for the ones who are willing to improve their alt text writing game. Remember that alt text enhances the accessibility of your website by reaching it to people who are even visually challenged. Therefore, creating good alt text could also help in improving the overall performance of the website.