Image descriptions, or alternative text (shortened to “alt text”) are, simply put, textual descriptions embedded into an image so people who are blind or visually impaired can enjoy the photo. Screen-reading technology, which converts text and other elements on a computer, tablet, or phone screen into spoken word for a person who’s blind or visually impaired, can’t read photos. It can sometimes use smart artificial intelligence to guess at what’s in a photo, such as a person smiling, or an outdoor scene. But the more intricate details of the photo are lost, until the user sharing it adds alt text. This in turn makes the media more accessible, and can reach an entirely new audience. Not a lot of businesses know about alt text, nor are they aware of how to implement it.
I’ve done videos on my YouTube channel demonstrating how to add alt text to Twitter and Instagram posts. There’s also an option to do so for Facebook, to bypass their autogenerated image descriptions. If you think a social media’s AI mistaking Girl Scout Cookies for a pizza is bad, then maybe you should take the five additional seconds to tap out a quick photo description to help those understand what it is you’re actually sharing.
I’m low vision, so I don’t use a screen reader and I’m not in need of alt text, as I can see photos; because I don’t use a screen reader, I wouldn’t be able to access the alt text anyway. But that doesn’t stop me from adding image descriptions to every photo I post. These descriptions can be as brief or intricate as you please, but the main goal is to get the point across of whatever images you’re sharing to the public. I’ve even gone back and retroactively added image descriptions to most of my Instagram feed, though I’ll admit I’ve seriously been slacking on my backlog. I’m grateful Facebook and Instagram offer the ability to go back into the edit process to add the alternative text, even though Twitter doesn’t—but that would require the ability to edit tweets, which I don’t think we’ll be seeing on the platform anytime soon.
Should you use alt text? Yes. Not a lot of people know it’s there, and sometimes they might not want to be bothered writing a description. It would make content more sharable if more people utilized it, broadening the creator’s audience. Something as simple as “A white woman with short brunette hair standing on a beach, wearing a red dress” is better than just slapping a photo up there without any description. Facebook will do its best to guess at the photo, saying something along the lines of “Outdoors, contains one person”, whereas other social media platforms may not have that technology at all, simply labeling the photo “Image”. Alt text is a great accessibility tool that takes little to no effort to utilize, and what’s best, it’s already enabled on social platforms by default. I encourage everyone to take the time to learn what it is and how to use it; it not only benefits the blind person who comes across one’s content, but the content creator as well, since their photos can then be shared and broaden the audience, garnering more shares and likes in the process.