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Website Accessibility

Images

Alt Text

A lot of people fail to add alt text to their images, which isn’t good because it’s valuable for several reasons. Alt text is what displays when your image fails to load. Alt text should describe what is in the image. Keep the text to around 125 characters long, as a general rule.

It is also crucial for visitors with accessibility problems. If someone uses a screen reader to access a website, the screen reader will read the alt text for them. If no alt text is provided, then the screen reader will just say “Image”.

Alt text also impacts your SEO, since search engines will recognize the alt text and factor it in your websites rankings for various keywords.

*The only time you don’t need to add alt text to images is if the images are purely decoration, i.e. a pattern or some texture.

Adding Alt Text In WordPress

In WordPress it’s pretty easy to add alt text to your images. Simply go to your media library, click on the image you need to add alt text to, then type in the alt text. There are a few other field options you should fill out as well.

Title: The only required field in the image options. Making the title of the image relevant to what is in the actual image is important for a couple reasons. Your image title is what the image url will be, so you want it to be something relevant and appropriate. The image title also may appear under the image in some WordPress widgets.

Description: Provides additional info for your users and shows up on the attachment page for that image.

Caption (Optional): This is the text that appears under the image when you add it to a page. A caption could be useful in various scenarios. For example, if it’s a group photo, you can use captions to label who is in the photo.

Image Alt Text Example

Text

Color

Text color is very important to consider when creating a site. It needs to have high contrast with the background it’s on.

Size

The size of the text needs to be large enough for people to see. For paragraph text, size 16 font is the smallest you should go.

Image Title

Video & Audio

If you have video and/or audio, you’ll need to add captions, so people who can’t hear will be able to know what the audio is saying.

Color & Size

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Useful Plugins

Web Accessibility by AccessiBe

AI-powered service boosts accessibility on your site.