Using Alt Text on Social Media and Websites
Many of the indie theater productions, companies, and venues in New York are working to ensure their productions are as inclusive as possible.
Social media platforms and websites have tools that you can utilize to ensure that your communication about your work is accessible to everyone. While we know that every venue and production is low on time and resources, including alt text in social media posts and websites is an important and essential step to reaching as many people as possible.
What is Alt Text?
Alternative text, better known as alt text, is a carefully constructed description of an image’s appearance, context, and function on your webpage, in an email, or on another online platform.
Why Do I Need Alt Text?
Alt text improves the online experience for your visitors, making it a necessary step not to skip.
For visually impaired people, alt text makes your websites, emails, and digital platforms accessible. Screen readers, as the name indicates, will read the content of the screen to individuals who cannot clearly see your online content. This includes the alternative text of your images.
Alt text is not only used by screen readers; it also comes in handy when your image fails to load. Because of poor internet speeds, an image on your site may not fully load, but the alt text will display instead. This is also what happens when your visitor selects to block image downloads. Alt text ensures that individuals don’t miss out on the information and experience you are sharing online in each of these situations.
In addition to creating a better visitor experience, alt text can help build your audience! Search engines also utilize the alternative text to understand the content of your page and, therefore, more accurately help individuals find your site in their results. In other words, it’s not just the text content used in SEO.
Alt text is also used when individuals do image searches. The text that describes the image will appear when an individual searches for a picture – and provide another avenue for someone to find your site.
Ensuring people can understand and engage in your online content while helping more people find your digital platforms – alt text is a win-win!
Tips to Great Alt Text
Here are a few tips as you review your website and email templates to update your alt text.
Give your image a specific description. Think about how you would describe the image over the phone. However, be sure not to editorialize or make assumptions about the picture.
Don’t just describe what the image is; put the alt text into the context of the rest of the webpage/email. Consider what you want people to get from the image and why you have included it.
Keep the alt text short. A lengthy description can distract the visitor, even confusing the screen or SEO reader. Some screen readers may cut off alt text at around 125 characters, so use that as your limit. The alt text can be kept short by NOT using “image of” or “picture of,” which just takes up character count without adding value to the visitor.
Don’t just copy the image caption. This is repetitive to the visitor, who will already see or hear the caption provided in the online text. Find other ways to incorporate keywords into the alt text without duplicating or elongating the overall experience of the page.
So, get creative not only with the images selected to help illustrate your organization’s work. Return to your content and be creative with describing those images in order to improve your online experience for everyone.
Example of Good vs. Bad Alt Text
Alt text that can be improved:
- Picture of a theater production
- Image of an empty theater, except for a few people on stage
Better alt text options:
- Our director and producers hard at work preparing for the new production of Requiem for a Tuesday at the Tessa Theater.
Tips for Avoiding Ableist Language and Terms
As we know from our work in theater, the specific language we use is important. It conveys meaning, intention, and respect. The words we use matter. They reflect our values.
There are certain words and phrases that are commonly used that are not inclusive to all members of our community. This post looks at some common words that ableist and alternatives to express the same sentiment.
Thanks: This blog post was created for IndieSpace by our friends at Social Change Consulting.