Skip to content Skip to site navigation

Best Practices for Image ALT Text

Friday, October 29, 2021

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." Adding Leland Stanford as the ALT text in Drupal

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.

Additional Resources

Learn more about Siteimprove

Learn more about digital accessibility

DISCLAIMER: UIT Blog is accurate on the publication date. We do not update information in past blog entries. We do make every effort to keep our service information pages up-to-date. Please search our service pages at uit.stanford.edu/search.