What’s in an image?
This is a question that most people can answer by looking at an image and judging for themselves what they can see. It could be a picture of a cat or a more abstract image that requires some thought.
Images are used to convey purpose or emotions.
But what if you can’t see? This is the reality that faces visually impaired users who are blind or partially sighted.
Many of these users will use screen reader software. It helps them by reading out the content that is on a web page. However, it can’t decipher what an image contains, so it’s unable to share that with the user. At best, the screen reader will try and read out the file name of the image. This isn’t particularly helpful and gives no context to a visually impaired user.
Search engines also struggle to read images. While there have been huge technological leaps over the years, we’re still not in a position where a search engine can immediately identify every image correctly.
Thankfully, there is something that you can put in place on your website that will give both your visually impaired users and the search engines a better experience. It’s something called “alternative attributes” or more commonly referred to as “alt tags”.
Alt tags allow you to give a description of the image as well as to convey its purpose. This will help users who are using assistive technology to be able to properly understand the images that you use on your website.
However, it’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just write a very basic description of something. For example, let’s imagine you have an aerial image of Central Park in Jakarta.
A really poor alt tag could be “image of park”. That doesn’t help any user or search engine to understand the context and purpose of your image.
Instead, you could use: “An aerial shot of Central Park in Jakarta.”
You can see with the second example that we’ve included a clearer description of the image. There is also proper capitalisation of the first word and a full stop at the end of the sentence. This helps the screen reader software to read out the content and to correctly pause when appropriate.
Every image on your website should have proper alt tags applied. This means adding a clear and helpful description to explain what the image is and to convey the purpose.
If the rare instances where an image is purely decorative and has no purpose, you can instead use a “NULL alt text” for the description. This is done by opening and closing quotation marks, with no content between them.
How you use and add alt tags on your website will depend on the platform you’re using. If you have any questions or would like to talk more about alt tags, please feel free to schedule a call with me. You can book in a call on my calendar here.
We’re at a time where website accessibility is more important than ever. Correctly using alt tags delivers a better experience to visually impaired users. It also helps search engines to understand the context of your content, which can deliver improvements in your rankings too.
P.S. If you want to maximize the SEO of your website and learn on how digital marketing can help your business, I’d be happy to discuss this with you. Please book a meeting with me using my calendar here.