But in reality, few websites offer alt text. A 2022 investigation by the nonprofit WebAIM examined images from the home pages of one million websites and found that 23.2 percent had missing alt text.
- What percentage of people use alt text?
- Should all images have alt text?
- How important is alt text?
- What is alt text on a website?
What percentage of people use alt text?
One analysis of a million homepages, by WebAIM, a nonprofit organization affiliated with Utah State University that focuses on web accessibility, found that as of February 2021, 60.6 percent had instances of missing alt text.
Should all images have alt text?
Don't add alt text to every image.
You should add alt text to most images on a webpage for the sake of SEO, UX, and accessibility — however, there are exceptions. Images that are purely decorative or are described in text nearby, for example, should have an empty alt attribute.
How important is alt text?
Also referred to as an alt description or an alt attribute, alt text is critical for those with disabilities because it describes the function and appearance of a photo or graphic they cannot see. PDF documents often contain images that convey critical information to the reader.
What is alt text on a website?
Alternative (Alt) Text is meant to convey the “why” of the image as it relates to the content of a document or webpage. It is read aloud to users by screen reader software, and it is indexed by search engines. It also displays on the page if the image fails to load, as in this example of a missing image.