Best practice for writing

Obviously, how long it may take for you to describe the image over the phone (and in our case, on our website) is something we want to control and describe as quickly and efficiently as possible.

One of the most common questions we get asked is 'how much is too much' to write for a description; well, we don't need to write an essay about the image and describe every specific detail but it needs enough information to be helpful.

Describe the image as succinctly as possible, but also as detailed as you think is needed

If we use the image above as an example, it's alternative description reads: "A young woman sitting on a couch talking on a phone"; thats a perfect amount of content as its to the point, its descriptive enough and it isn't highlighting things that are less important to the context.

Does the fact the phone is an old, yellow phone matter to our user? What if a user has never seen what the colour yellow looks like?

Do the bottles of fizzy pop placed on the table in the background give us information we feel our user is missing out on or is it potentially going to make our description more complicated?

We'll let you be the judge.

No limits

Alt text doesn't have a strict character limit, but acceptable guidance is to ensure your descriptions are no longer than around 125 characters. This is to do with certain assistive technologies stopping reading the alt text at around that many characters, so let's keep it within that if you can.

Another tip is based on what the accessibility tool WAVE checks for, they specifically question anything over 100 characters for being potentially too long, stating: “Alternative text should be succinct, yet descriptive of the content and function of an image. Lengthy alternative text (more than around 100 characters) often indicates that extraneous content or content that is not available to sighted users is being presented”.

Now obviously that is just an indicator, but the tool will flag any images you’ve made to be too long, so if you want to avoid the flags when checking your websites accessibility that’s something to think about.

People focussed

Explain the people in images if they're featured; their gender, their race, their situation. We're wanting to be as inclusive and representative as possible, so explain who the people are in your imagery and don't just say 'person' or 'people'. If they are members of staff, provide their job title - it's all about giving context to the people in your imagery. If it's a stock image, the individuals should not be identified.

Writing the perfect alternative text for your websites imagery.