Images

Do your images have the right alternative 'alt' text to describe the information of the image?

Why it’s important

Alfie is blind and uses a braille reader to understand the image alt text.
Anna's page didn't fully load and failed to download the images.
Sunil is using a search engine to seek information. Using descriptive alt text on an image will improve the search results.

Only include images on a content page if they meet a real user need.
Different image types have different alt text requirements. Use the alt text decision tree from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help you work out what alt text you need.
Give your images short, descriptive file names.
Use null (empty) alt text when text describing the image is already on the page (alt="").
Don’t start the alt text with Image of or Photo of – the screen reader already announces that images are images.
If the image is for decoration only and you don’t want the screen reader to announce it, use null (empty) alt text (alt="").
If you use a caption, don’t use the same text in the caption and alt text. Otherwise a person listening to the page hears the same information twice.

Last modified: 22 October 2021