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Your image descriptions should be high quality and easily understood by your audience. Follow these best practices when writing your own alternative text.
Finally, avoid using AI to generate alt text for you. At this point, AI generators don’t always accurately identify what information the reader needs to know about an image.
You don’t necessarily need to write alt text for every single image on your website. To identify which images need alt text, decide which are decorative images and which are essential.
Decorative content isn’t required to understand the meaning or use of your web page and doesn’t need alt text. For example, a section divider doesn’t need alt text.
Essential content is anything that’s necessary to understand or use the page. Essential images do need alt text.
An easy way to differentiate between the two types of images is to ask yourself: “If I remove this from the page, does the meaning of the page change?”
Use image alt text best practices for file names too. An accessible file name is descriptive of the image it’s attached to, instead of vague or auto-generated. For example, use “PersonEatingGrape.jpg” instead of “IMG4729.jpg”.
This has two added advantages: Image files are easier for you to organize and better set up for SEO . Appearing in image searches is another great way to drive search engine traffic to your website.
Note: This guide is available as a resource to help you get started, but shouldn't be construed or relied upon as legal advice. Squarespace can't provide advice about making your site compliant with any specific accessibility laws, regulations, or standards
Here are two examples of effective alt text for images. Note that alt text is context-specific—alt text that’s good in one scenario won’t necessarily apply to the same photo used in another scenario.
Imagine this photo appeared in a listicle about basic camera types. In that context, a good example of alt text for this image might be: “A DSLR camera and lens in an open carrying case.”
In that context, an example of alt text that needs improvement would be: “Image of a camera on a gray background.”
This example uses “image of”, which assistive devices already say before reading alt text. It also doesn’t give important details about the camera or other objects in the image that would be useful for someone reading about camera types.
An example of good alt text for this image could be: “A set of colorful letter-size envelopes”
In a context where this image is used to break up the page visually without adding any necessary information, you could skip writing alt text for it.
While alt text is helpful and necessary, it can be hard to fit all the needed information in 250 characters or less. This is especially the case for more complex images like charts, graphs, infographics, and long videos that may need much longer descriptions to get the most important information across.
In those cases, you can:
Alt text and web accessibility are essential, not just “nice to haves” for your website . The more accessible your website is, the more visitors can use it, regardless of their circumstances.