When alt text is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Alt text is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is worth it

Describe the purpose, not the appearance. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How to decide

Never start with "image of". Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about alt text before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Never start with "image of" — 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.