Improving Accessibility with Alternative Text

Having an editable website means that it's not just down to the developer or design team to make sure that the site is accessible. If it wasn't before, it's definitely now your responsibility to make your content accessible.

Making the content easy for your audience to understand is your most obvious task but you should also remember to provide alternative text for non-text elements like images so that people who can't see things like images still know what they add to the page.

You might already know about the 'alt' attribute that can be used to provide alternative text for an image. Using the content management system that comes with our websites, inserting images into your pages and providing those images with an alt attribute is easy. But we know from experience that the alt attribute isn't always (or often) used correctly, causing pages to be less accessible than they should or could be.

In fact, the alt attribute isn't the only way to provide alternative text for images and other non-text elements in a page. It's perfectly acceptable, in certain circumstances, to provide alternative text in the main content of the page and leave the alt attribute blank.

Getting alternative text right shouldn't slow down your productivity so read this short article on the Appropriate use of alternative text and you'll soon know how to do it properly and quickly.