In a recent Google podcast, Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller discuss using Alt Text to help people using screen readers and the difficulty of leveraging it to define SEO and accessibility.
Image alt texts are used to help website visitors with visual impairment ( and search engine bots) understand the meaning of the displayed images. It also helps people using screen readers know the purpose of the creative or understand the text being shown.
The World Web Consortium ( W3C) also included image alt text as a determining factor of SEO. W3C released a tutorial to explain the seven types of image contexts. Ideally, you are not supposed to name the image simply as “image” or a screenshot as “screenshot” because Google will consider such instances redundant. John Mueller finds it tricky to balance alt text, the accessibility aspect, and SEO effectively- alt text included for SEO reasons may not be equally impactful for accessibility. But the consensus is that it is never advisable to leave the alt text field empty to stop screen readers from reading out the image file name, thereby negatively affecting the reading experience. Not including alt text will also prevent readers from receiving crucial information from some of the images. Next comes the SEO part of alt texts, where the goal is to get the images on the website properly indexed and featured in SERPs. John Mueller recommends everyone include something in the alt text as something is better than nothing.
The next topic related to the discussion was decorative images. Lizzi Sassman says it is a tough nut to track when it comes to distinguishing between decorative and conceptual images. Unlike decorative images, conceptual ones contribute to the meaning of the content. Even if they find a way out, the challenge of communicating the meaning of the conceptual image remains. W3C uses four tests to identify decorative images:
1. Image is added for styling purposes ( based on the look and feel)
2. Image that enhances the link text
3. Images that add no value to the text content
4. If the surrounding text content describes the image
Google gives freedom to the author to decide what he wants to incorporate into an image alt text. Google’s “something is better than nothing” should be remembered even if your image does not convey any information to the reader. In such cases, you can add the null value corresponding to alt texts, which is coded with alt=””.
Recent Posts