Before you invest in alt text

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on alt text, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Describe the purpose, not the appearance
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

Decorative images should have empty alt attributes. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Never start with "image of". None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about alt text before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Decorative images should have empty alt attributes — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.