Design for all » Inclusive usability » Alt texts

Decision trees are intended to help decide whether and what kind of alt text to use.

Writing alt texts is not an easy task, but a key part of the design process. Creating good text descriptions for images is an art of its own, but not one that couldn’t be acquired.

Also the appropriate length of an alt text is a debated aspect:

Things work slightly differently if SVG vector graphics are embedded directly (not as an <img>).

Recently, one may occasionally see suggestions to use AI technology to compensate for a lack of alt texts, or to simply make writing them obsolete.

This is a heavily disputed approach; the debate is (along with, for example, environmental concerns, given the energy consumption of AI) largely unfolding around the question whether using AI to interpret images without alt text should rather be left to the user, than generating texts that have not been gone through editorial review.

The same rules apply for HTML used in email as well. With their generic browsing engines, there are however a long range of aspects to be considered.