The Literary Style of Alt-Text

The meditative art of describing images in words

See that image above? When I posted it, I wrote some alt-text for it — i.e. a description of what’s in the image.

Here’s what I wrote:

A group of alphabetic dice spelling out the words “ALT TEXT”. They are on a white surface and surrounded on all sides by perhaps two dozen similar dice that have random letters that spell nothing. Each die has a small hole going through the center; they’re the type of dice you see used to make bracelets that spell out messages

This is new behavior for me — but one that has opened some interesting writerly doors.

Lemme unpack this …

For years, I rarely included alt-text when I posted images online.

I knew I was supposed to. There are many excellent things that alt-text does — the chief of which is that it makes images accessible to anyone who’s sight-impaired. If there’s alt-text, then their screen-reader software can tell them what’s going on in the images. If not …