Image Alt Text, the Way the Spec Intended It

By Timothy Foster

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In HTML, you can give a text description to images, called the alt text. For the sake of accessibility (i.e. people who cannot see the image or for whom it takes a long time to download), you should _always_:

• Provide alt text
• Or explicitly declare no alt text (for purely decorative images)

What makes for good alt text?

Treat alt text as a replacement in the page’s context.

A good way to think about it is this: if you were describing the page to somebody on the phone, what would you say when you reached the image?