This resource is intended to help you strategize and create alt text for the images on your site. 

What is alt text? 

Alt text is a snippet of code that can be added to an image on your website. Its purpose is to describe the image for two purposes. The first is in the event that the image doesn’t load, the alt text will appear where the broken image is located on the page, so a person can still get the gist of it. 

The second purpose is arguably much more significant – accessibility. Alt text is narrated aloud by assistive technology (screen readers) for people with visual impairments. Its goal is to clearly explain the image and its context. 

Does alt text impact SEO?

Google counts image alt text as a ranking factor (point #26 on this list of ranking factors). Here’s what you need to know about that.

Not having it will NOT hurt your site’s SEO in any way that you’d notice – it’s not going to be the difference between being on page 1 or page 2 of search results. It’s one of 200 ranking factors, and a portion of the image optimization factor along with filename, title, and (if applicable), description and caption. 

But having it is an SEO quick-win. If you combine it with several other quick-win optimizations, you could see a noticeable difference in a page’s ranking. 

Image alt text and Canadian law

Currently only certain private and government sites have to meet accessibility standards, but eventually that is likely to expand to all websites. Since image alt text is one of the points covered by accessibility standards, this means that eventually you’ll have to provide it. 

Does every image need alt text?

This is where it gets murky. Accessibility tools will give a ‘fail’ to all images that don’t have an alt attribute. This leads many organizations to write alt text for all images.

But imagine that you’re blind, and your screen reader is narrating a website’s About page. It gets to the company values, where they have four icons next to the headings and body text for each value. The icons have alt text, so the screen reader describes each icon before reading the value. This is a terrible experience! Your reading flow is interrupted constantly by descriptions of decorative page elements that get in the way of the actual information. The same is true of stock images that don’t add context to the page or the text around them. 

From a UX perspective, you should only add alt text to images that a person needs to understand in order to get the full experience of your content. Examples are logos (partners, awards, etc.), graphs or charts, maps, products, and infographics.  

If you want to pass an accessibility checker as part of your organization’s business objectives (or if it’s legally required for your site), you should write custom alt text for all images that provide context to the page. For images that don’t, such as icons or stock/decorative photos, there are ways to code the alt attribute so that it’s filled only with an instruction for a screen reader to skip it. 

How should I write alt text?

Do:

  • Be concise – no more than 1-2 sentences or 125 characters (140 characters for complex images like charts)  
  • Be specific – if it’s a dog say which breed it is, what colour it is, 
  • Be descriptive – make sure to include the most important details
  • Use punctuation – this helps the screen reader know where to pause and stop

Don’t:

  • Start with “image of” or “photo of” – the screen reader will state that it’s an image
  • Stuff keywords into descriptions – this is an outdated SEO practice and a terrible user experience 
  • Be overly wordy, vague, or jargony – keep it on-brand with the rest of your content 

Where do I put image alt text? 

Unfortunately, we haven’t yet found a way to import alt text that was added via photo editing software or in a previous WordPress site. This means it needs to be added to images once they have been uploaded to your new site, during QA or post-launch. Post-launch is totally fine, because as mentioned, this isn’t going to have a noticeable impact on your site’s SEO. 

You can add alt text to your images by opening each image from the media library (via the lefthand menu in your dashboard). All you need to do is open the image, write or copy/paste the alt text into the correct field, and click anywhere outside of the alt text field for it to automatically save. Here’s a demo video. 

Can I use a plugin to automate alt text?

You can, but we recommend being extremely careful when choosing a tool for this task, due to how strongly it impacts the user experience. 

Most plugins that claim to generate alt text will scrape the page title and focus keyword(s), and add a snippet of useless text that combines those things and has nothing to do with the image itself. 

We have tested one paid plugin that we think does a great job: https://alttext.ai/ 

Can you write alt text for me? 

Writing alt text isn’t covered in the default scope of work, due to the potential volume of images and our limited internal resources for copywriting. However, Forge and Smith can provide a quote based on the number of images you need. Our professional copywriter will provide thoughtfully written alt text.