Alt Text
The text describing an image, shown when the image fails to load and read aloud by screen readers.
Analogy Mental model
The caption written on the back of a photograph. Lose the photo and the caption still tells you what it showed.
In practice What you actually do
Describe what is in the frame using the words someone would search for: barista pouring latte art into a ceramic cup. Keep it under 125 characters. The test is whether a person who cannot see the image understands what they are missing.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Stacking keywords into alt text reads as spam to the engine and as nonsense to a screen reader user who has to sit through it. Decorative images, dividers and spacers take an empty alt so they are skipped.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →