Summary

Universe automatically generates alt text for new images uploaded to the sites you build on the web or in the app. (Learn more on that in this article.) Alt text ensures users with different abilities can still understand the content of your site, while also making your site more likely to be indexed for discoverability on search engines. All together, that means increasingly the likelihood of people visiting your site and being able to benefit from your awesome content!

Accessibility

Alternate text (alt text) is a piece of code embedded in digital content, like a web page or PDF, that describes a photo or graphic. You’ve probably seen it pop up when you hover over an image or when an image is missing. 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. If the reader cannot see the image, the author must describe it to them accurately.

From: Commonlook

Accessibility benefits of alt text

• Alt Text has great benefits to those with visual impairments, as it allows screen readers and other accessibility solutions to describe images to those who might not be able to visually process them.
• This makes sure your beautiful site can be fully appreciated as a whole by a broader audience.
• This also means you are being inclusive of users who might have visual impairments when you use Universe to build a site with incredible images.

Discoverability

Alt tags provide context to what an image is displaying, informing search engine crawlers and allowing them to index an image correctly. However, not only do alt tags help search engine crawlers, not setting alt tags  for your images can have a detrimental effect on the ranking of your web pages.

Alt text is also important when browsers are unable to render a page properly, meaning the web page does not display the images. In place of images the website will return the alt attributes instead, describing what image should be showing. If you do not have any alt attributes set then this means the user will have no idea what image was meant to display, providing a significantly poorer user experience.

Fundamentally, the purpose of alt text is to improve accessibility by describing what an image is showing to visitors who do not have the ability to see them. However, it also helps search engine crawlers and so improves SEO. Failing to set alt attributes for images means that your website becomes difficult for screen readers and browsers to interpret and reduces the user experience for anyone who is visually impaired. Ensure that every visitor, as well as search engines can access your content by making sure you set descriptive alt text for all your websites images.

From: Innovation Visual

Discoverability benefits of alt text

• Alt Text also increments the amount of meta data that can be identified by web crawlers for search engines like Google, potentially increasing organic ranking in search results and leading to greater discoverability.