A short guide to alt text

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Everything we would tell a client about alt text in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What it costs to ignore

Describe the purpose, not the appearance. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The practical version

Decorative images should have empty alt attributes. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The mistakes we see most

Never start with "image of". Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What this looks like day to day

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about alt text before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Describe the purpose, not the appearance — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.