Accessibility and inclusion: a reminder about alternative (alt) text
Web accessibility has always been a requirement for U海角社区 websites, and has been a regular feature in our monthly newsletter. Ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy.
This month, we revisit the topic of alt text.
What is 鈥渁lt text鈥?
Alt text is an alternative description for an image on your website. Visitors who rely on assistive technology such as screen readers cannot see these images. When the page is read aloud the image will be denoted as 鈥渋mage鈥 in the audio. Without alt text, the visitor misses out on the information that you intended to convey with an image.
The most frequent visitor to your website that relies on alt text is likely Google and other search engines. Search engines do not see with eyes, and so they rely on the non-visual content of your web page in order to characterize it for search. Because of this, proper alt text on images is helpful both to your visitors and your website鈥檚 appearance in search (especially Google Images).