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Writing good alt text can be a challenge.
In my day job as an accessibility consultant, I describe writing alt text as an art rather than a science.
While there are a few guiding principles based off accessibility best practices, there's also a lot of wiggle room.
The following tips are based off a combination of best practices and my own personal taste:
• **Be concise**.
Screen readers take time to read things.
How long depends on that person's screen reader settings.
An experienced screen reader user like myself may have theirs set to talk really fast, whereas a novice user is likely to have theirs set at a more conversational pace.
• **Don't describe every detail**.
Remember back in elementary school when you'd be asked to read something and determine what the main idea of the passage was?
Do something similar with your images and describe what you'd like someone to take from it.
• **Avoid redundancies**.
If something's in the body of your post, it probably doesn't need to be in the alt text.
Additionally, remember how screen readers work.
Since they will identify an item as a graphic when they encounter it, you don't need to say so in the alt text.
It's fine to say something like "Picture shows" if you're describing an image in nearby text content, but it's just repetitive when it's in the alt text itself.
Writing good alt text can be a challenge and may seem hard at first.
Like anything else, though, it gets easier with practice.
Over time you will figure out what works best for you.
Alt Text and Social Media
Justin Yarbrough
The Tralfamadorians, according to Salo, manufactured each other.
No one knew for certain how the first machine had come into being.
The legend was this: Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines.
They weren’t dependable.
They weren’t efficient.
They weren’t predictable.
They weren’t durable.
And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was.
And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it.
This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes.
But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.
The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.
And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying.
So they turned that job over to the machines, too.
And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
That’s a lot to take in, but this image can help you visualise it:
German Prepositions – The Ultimate Guide (with Charts)
George Julian
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