Alt Text

Alt text is a short written description attached to an image, held in the page's code rather than shown on the screen. It was introduced so that people using screen readers would not simply meet a gap where a picture was. It now does a second job, for a second kind of reader: it is the only part of an image a machine can actually read.

That second job matters most for the businesses whose evidence is visual. The portfolio of finished work. The photographs of the room, the dish, the restoration. The before and the after. The certificate on the wall. To anything reading your site, every one of those is currently a blank space with a filename beside it. The most persuasive material you have is the material that never arrives.

It gets worse wherever text has been baked into a picture. A menu saved as a single image, a price list exported as a graphic, opening hours set inside a designed banner — all of it is, to a machine, simply absent. The page appears to say nothing about what you charge or when you open, and no amount of alt text fully repairs that, because one sentence cannot carry a menu.

Doing it properly is unglamorous. Describe what someone who cannot see it would need to be told, in one plain sentence, using specific nouns: not "our work" but "a re-pointed Victorian brick facade after cleaning". Skip "image of" — the reader already knows. Leave the description genuinely empty for images that are pure decoration, which is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. And where information lives only inside the picture, put it in text on the page as well.

The plain version: this is the same courtesy running in two directions. Writing down what can be seen, for whoever cannot see it — a person using a screen reader, or a machine deciding whether your work is worth mentioning. One sentence, written once, serves both.