What is Alt text?
Also called: Alternative text, Alt attribute
The short answer
Alt text is a written description of an image in the HTML, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand the picture.
Alt text, explained
Describe what matters about the image in context. Purely decorative images get empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
Questions people ask about Alt text
What is Alt text?
Alt text is a written description of an image in the HTML, read aloud by screen readers and used by search engines to understand the picture.
Related terms
Web accessibility means building sites everyone can use, including people who are blind, deaf, have limited movement or cognitive differences, whatever device or assistive technology they use.
Image optimisationImage optimisation is serving images at the right size, format and quality for each device, so pages load fast without visibly losing quality.
SEOSEO is the practice of making a website easier for search engines to crawl, understand and rank, so it appears for the searches its audience actually makes.
KeywordA keyword is a word or phrase people type into a search engine; SEO matches pages to the keywords their audience uses.
Part of the Web Encyclopedia by Apex Flow Digital. Definitions are general knowledge, kept current, with no invented statistics.