Alt Text: What Do You Say When Asked?

By Unregistered User (not verified), 31 October, 2023

Forum
Accessibility Advocacy

Question: How do you advise on writing alt text? Share your tips. 99 chars or less.

My answer:

Briefly capture the image's essence, focusing on emotion and context. Keep it simple and clear. (95)

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Comments

By Brian on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

It has been a dog's age since I wrote code for anything in web design, whether HTML, Php, CSS, etc. Nevertheless, when it comes to image/control descriptions, it depends on the type of labelling .

If I am doing Alt text, I try to be as descriptive as one can, within a sentence or 2.

Aria label (screen reader exclusive) I write even less. As I understand it, you can write a paragraph, but it would make navigating rather verbose.

Just my 2 cents. 😇

By Jim D on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

Describe the action in the photo. Imagine you had to convey this picture to a friend by leaving them a short voicemail.

By OldBear on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

Kind of wish there was a way to expand the alt text from brief to detailed with a command.
What is not helpful,and is also frustrating, is some of the auto generated alt text on Facebook that says, may be a picture of text. There are plenty of times that Facebook says what the text says, though it may be a little scrambled, but I would rather have it say it can't interpret the picture, than just tell me there might be text there without attempting to read the text.

By Brian on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

Edit: Sorry for the caps. No idea what happened there...

You could probably do this with CSS code. Like how some websites have an accessibility mode.

By Andy Lane on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

The latest TestFlight version of BME now automatically fills in meta data with the Be My Ai description when you swipe down to copy directly from the app. Hopefully that will remove steps when entering alt text. I don’t know when this feature will be in the public version but shouldn’t be long.

It also appends Described with Be My AI to alert people that the image description was generated with AI so may not be accurate.

By OldBear on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

Sorry, that didn't add anything.

Put a brief description of the image and include text in the image.
I think that's 55 words.

By Brian on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

I obviously fail at math, and I'm not even counting my edit, as that was after the fact. 🤷🏻‍♂️

By PaulMartz on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

I recently came across this article from W3 that provides advice on ALT text. But I'll stick with my earlier comment. What are you trying to communicate to sighted users with the image? Communicate the same information in the ALT text field.

By Kevin Shaw on Thursday, November 23, 2023 - 11:30

When asked, I share this resource.

https://www.deque.com/blog/great-alt-text-introduction/

This covers how to write alt text for different kinds of images like photos, maps, icons, logos and so on.

As a general rule, 150 characters is the right amount of alt text without getting too long. If the description is longer, the creator can use the HTML caption element, provide alt text in an accordion component or create a separate page with the description.

Hope this is helpful.