University IT
Best Practices for Image ALT Text
This week, I want to highlight a recent policy I wrote called A11y: Bad Alt Text. This policy simply looks for any ALT text that has the word "picture" or "image" in it.
Content authors often write ALT text like this: "Picture of Leland Stanford."
What the screen reader announces will be something like "Picture of Leland Stanford image."
Screen readers announce ALT text along with “image” because the text is associated specifically with an image. That extra "picture of" simply adds noise for people using screen readers to access the page.
A better ALT text in this case would be just "Leland Stanford."
So, take a look at the A11y: Bad Alt Text policy and make sure you’re not putting extraneous information in your ALT text.
Read more about writing ALT text for images.
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