Alt text

“Alt tet”Alt text” is text that you add to images on your website, so that people who are blind or have impaired vision can use their screen reader to tell them what the image is. I’ve been very bad about adding alt text to images on this blog, partly because I was unsure how much detail I should go into.

Well, someone on Mastodon pointed out this guide to writing alt text on the UX Collective website: “How to write an image description.” The author, Alex Chen, suggests a model format he calls “object-action-context.”

Then Chen provides examples of alt text using his object-action-context model. He goes into details like how long alt text descriptions should be (it varies depending on the image). He also points out that any image description is better than none at all.

Chen has inspired me to add alt text to all images on my websites, and (more importantly) on our congregation’s website.