What is Alt text?

Alternative text, or Alt text, is text that is digitally attached to images embedded in your documents and websites. When a screen reader comes across an image, rather than skipping over it, it will read the text entered for that image.

Alt text will not be visible to anyone not using a screen reader.

How is Alt text different from captions?

Screen readers will read a caption, so there is no reason to reproduce a caption as Alt text. Instead, Alt text should describe an image, and put it in context of the reading or webpage.

Use your judgment when adding Alt text to an image. For example, if a caption already describes the image, it may not be necessary to add Alt text. In other cases, the body text of a reading might already cover in detail what the image in question looks like.

You can add Alt text to an image you are adding to your materials by clicking on the "Embed image" icon (in your toolbar, circled below in red), then choosing "Images" (to the right of the screen, outlined with a red box), and then adding Alternative text to the image in the "Attributes" section (underneath Image Source, with a red arrow pointing to it).

Image of screen shot demonstrating the process of adding alt text to an image

Added benefit of Alt text:

If an image disappears, the Alt text that remains in its place can help you quickly identify what was there.