Writing Alt-text Value for SEO and Screen Readers

Images give context to your readers. Unfortunately, web readers were not created equal. Readers with a disability navigate to the information age using web technologies like screen readers. People who are blind, have low vision or have cognitive disabilities are among those who use screen readers.

WebAim 2019 reports say the majority of the disability type of screen reader users were blind and 71.3% of screen reader users rely on screen reader audio. This is where the alt-text value is important. ‘Alt text’ is a contraction of ‘alternative text’. When a screen reader comes across an image, it will read the text differently.

What about Google Image Indexing?

You could argue that it is also critical to consider the Google Indexing process when adding alt-text values to all web images. Without a doubt, yes! In fact, according to Google’s best practices for Google Images, “focus on the user by providing a great user experience: make pages primarily for users, not search engines.”.

There is a pattern to their best recommendation, we have object, action, and context: The main focus is on the object. The action describes what is going on, which is usually what the object is doing. The context describes the immediate surroundings. Alex Chen expounded on this framework and provided more examples in his article.

What about Ranking Image?

Yes, an increasing number of people will use images to find information on the internet. This means that if you don’t optimize your images for SEO by using alt text, you’re passing up a valuable source of organic traffic. In fact, some content editors include keywords in their images to rank locally, this is fine as long as it won’t hurt user experience, as what Google says in their images' best practices:

Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam. Also consider the accessibility of your alt text, and add the alt attribute as necessary

But if you are in doubt about adding keywords to your alt-image naming framework, just don’t do it.

Here are some of patterns we can use to write alt-text values:

Another reason to not be concerned about image ranking is Google MUM, a new algorithm introduced by Google in May 2021. One of its most useful features is its ability to extract information from images. Who knows, MUM may allow users to upload images of mountain shoes and use data to answer the question “Which brand is best for trekking?”.

Assigning values to alt-text is difficult, especially when we have competing goals. When Google says “create pages primarily for users, not search engines,” it means “please your readers, and I’ll take care of the rest.” The algorithm will evolve over time but giving the best reading experience is the ultimate goal.