We’ve been working on new digital accessibility guidance for everyone at the University to use. The guidance doesn’t just cover the website – you'll also find out how to create accessible: 

• images
• emails
• documents
• video and audio

One of the things we needed to get to grips with when putting together this guidance was alternative text. You’ve probably seen the phrase ‘alt text’ while browsing the web or checking your Instagram. Or maybe you’re a web editor who writes alt text on the regular. But do you really understand why we need to use alt text? Or when to use it and when not to? 

How we put together our alt text guidance 

Alt text is added to digital images to describe them to people who can’t see them. As a university, we're legally required to make the content on our website as accessible as possible.  
 
When we started working on the content for our digital accessibility guidance, we had various discussions as a team about alt text best practice and how we wanted everyone at the University to use it. This included discussing if every image should have alt text or not. During our alt text journey, we learnt that it actually depends on the context of the page and if adding alt text would add value to the user. 

Rethinking decorative images 

A good example of when you don’t need to use alt text on Typecase is on decorative images. Decorative images don’t add any valuable information, they're just used to make your page look visually appealing. The full-width Hero images we use at the top of web pages are an example of a decorative image.  

By marking an image as decorative, assistive technology won’t tell the user there’s an image there, so people who are visually impaired don’t have to listen to a description of an image that adds no useful information to the page. This goes for any other image added to a web page to make it look pretty. 

The dilemma about describing people 

Another important point that we needed to approach was how to describe people in an image. When writing alt text about people’s characteristics, should we be describing things like race, ethnicity, or gender to improve diversity and share these characteristics with a wider audience? Or should we avoid describing people using assumptions based on their appearance? 

What other people do 

We decided to have a look at what other organisations recommended, reading guidance from other universities and organisation websites like gov.uk and WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).  

In October, some of the Digital Content team went to the ContentEd conference and joined a group discussion about alt text with people from other universities. The group were debating how to describe people in alt text, and it was interesting to see that other organisations were going through the same journey of discovery as us. The group didn't reach a clear decision about it and some people suggested that it's better to describe people, even if you don't know how they identify, for the sake of diversity, and be open and honest about it if they say you got it wrong. 

This research and the group discussions were very useful and have helped us with our guidance, but we’re still having ongoing discussions within the Content team, with colleagues in the office, and with ED&I (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) to work out the best way to describe people. 

Realising context is key 

The consensus we’ve reached for now is that it’s all about context. Only describe people in alt text if the context of the web page makes their race, gender, or another characteristic relevant, and be very careful not to make assumptions about the way people look. 

What’s even better is if you know the people in the image. Then things become a lot easier! If you are taking photos or videos of people, ask them in writing how they'd like to be described. Then you know you’re getting it right from the very start and not making any assumptions. 

To see an example in practice, here is an image of four postgraduate students on campus. 

When writing alt text for this image, you might be unsure on how much to mention about the characteristics of the students. This is a good example of when you should think about the context of the page. 

If it’s on a general postgraduate student recruitment page, it probably isn’t necessary to mention the race and gender of the students. In fact, you could even mark it as decorative as it doesn’t add any additional information to the page. 

However, if this image was on a page about diversity on campus, the alt text would describe the race and gender of each student. 

Check out this article to find some good examples of writing alt text for people. 

Keeping up to date with accessibility 

As we're legally required to make our website content accessible to all users, it’s vital that we stay up to date with the latest accessibility guidelines. This means that although this guidance is relevant right now, things may change in the future.  

As discussions about diversity, alt text, and accessibility are ongoing, we will keep reviewing official recommendations and our views on alt text to make sure we’re always doing what we think is right.

Find out more about digital accessibility 

We hope you’ve found this blog post useful, and you feel confident to get out there and write some amazing alt text. If it’s made you want to learn more, we’ve published digital accessibility guidance so you can discover how to make your digital content accessible to everyone.