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Writing great alt text: Emotion matters

• Jake Archibald describes how he was trying to decide what alt text to use for his avatar, which would appear alongside his name, in a list of conference speakers. His (and my) instinct was that it should be nullified (alt="") because it would otherwise be repeating information elsewhere in the page.
• However, in his avatar, Jake is pulling a pose and aiming to inject a bit of humour. It’s not right that screen reader users miss out on that context. So Jake opted for the following alt text: “Jake, cheekily peering from behind a plant”.
• Léonie Watson has written about this in her blog post, Text descriptions and emotion rich images. Context matters. Developers sometimes worry that descriptive alt text will make the page too ‘noisy’, but as Léonie points out, screen reader users will skip over large swathes of the page in the same way as sighted users would.
• This seems to be a bit of a trending topic at the moment; I recently covered a similar article by Eric Bailey which concludes that most images nowadays are not purely ‘decorative’ and do require alt text.
• Jake adds that “if you’re trying to do the right thing, you’re almost certainly improving the experience for real people”. Most of the time, your alt text won’t be worse than no alt text at all.

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