What is alt text?
Every image on a web page can carry an alt attribute: a short line of text that stands in for the picture when the picture cannot be seen. Screen readers speak it to blind and low-vision visitors. Browsers show it when an image fails to load. Search engines read it to work out what the image is, which is how a product photo ends up in Google Images and how an image contributes to the page's meaning. It is the simplest piece of metadata on the web and one of the most neglected.
Good alt text describes what is in the image and why it is there, in a sentence or less. "Woman carrying the brown leather tote in the rain on a New York street" tells a screen reader user what they are missing and tells Google what the image is about. "IMG_4471.jpg" tells nobody anything.
Why it matters
Why alt text matters
Accessibility is the first reason and the one that carries legal weight. Sites that cannot be used with a screen reader are a liability in many jurisdictions and an insult everywhere, and alt text is the baseline requirement. A campaign page that is only images, with none of them described, is a blank page for a portion of your audience.
Search is the second. For a brand whose work is visual, image search is real traffic, and alt text is the primary signal for it. It also supports the page itself: an image described as the product it shows reinforces the page's topic in a way a nameless file cannot.
In practice
How alt text works in practice
- 01
Write it when the image is uploaded, not afterwards. Content management systems have a field for it; designers and content editors should treat it as part of the asset, like the file name and the caption. Describe the content, mention the product or subject by name where it is relevant, and keep it under about 125 characters so screen readers do not truncate it. Leave the attribute empty (alt="") for purely decorative images, so assistive technology skips them rather than announcing "image" with nothing to say.
- 02
Audit it. A crawl of the site lists every image with missing or empty alt text, and the fix is a content job rather than a technical one. Prioritize product images, campaign imagery and anything that carries information a visitor would otherwise lose.
Watch out
What people get wrong about alt text
Stuffing it with keywords. Alt text that reads "creative agency New York best creative agency NYC agency" is useless to a screen reader user and reads as spam to Google; it is keyword stuffing in a smaller box. Describe the picture. The opposite failure is writing nothing, which is still the default state of most of the web, or writing "image" or "photo," which describes every image ever made.
Putting the message in the image. Text baked into a graphic, with no alt text and no equivalent on the page, is invisible to search and to assistive technology. If the words matter, they belong in the HTML, and the image gets an alt that describes it.
