A picture is worth a thousand words, but not to people who can’t see it! Therefore, image descriptions are vital to people with a vision impairment. Image descriptions, aka Alternative Text or Alt-text, is a screen reading tool allowing people to hear a description of the content of an image and helps when images on a website won’t load.
You can add alt text information to photographs, infographic documents, charts, tables, shapes, SmartArt, embedded objects, animations, or video clips. Without alt text, people with a vision impairment might know they have landed on a picture but cannot know what’s shown in the image.
The usefulness of alt text depends on where and why people with a vision impairment find an image, i.e., the purpose of the image. For example, two same photos of a person appear on two different sources like a news website and a dating website. What people want to know about that person would differ in both cases, making image descriptions vary.
How to add Alt Text to an image?
Follow one of the two steps given below to add Alt-text to an image
- Follow one of the two steps given below to add Alt-text to an image:
- Right-click the picture and select Edit Alt Text
- Select the picture and then select the format menu for it, for example, Picture Format > Alt Text
- Type a detailed description of the image conveying the content and the intent of the image concisely and straightforwardly. The image description shouldn’t be longer than a sentence or two.
Also, some social media platforms (LinkedIn included) allow you to enter in the Alt Text description when uploading an image.
Please consider the above information when posting images on social media.