Captions and Alt Text

Why is this important?

Photo captions provide information and context to users that a photo doesn’t provide on its own. A caption might include the name of someone in the photo, the place depicted or an event description.

A portrait of a student or professor often needs only the name of the person. A more candid photo with a mix of people and things happening might need a more involved caption and often requires identification cues. Cues might be as simple as “From left” for a row of people or as complex as “First row, third from right.”

Traditionally, captions for photos depicting action are written in present tense.

Whenever possible, credit photographers. Where and how to add that credit depends on the page design, but a couple of examples are included below.

Examples:

UNIVERSITY RELATIONS	PHOTO BY DAVID SPEAR, WALTON COLLEGE	Razorback Clyde Scott wins a silver medal at the London Olympics.
Dean Kim Needy	*(Photo from Razorback* yearbook)**	Dean Matt Waller, left, talks with Mary Jones, in red sweater, after a business class.

Keep in mind: Captions don’t need to retell facts already covered by accompanying text, although adding some detail in captions will help a web photo rise in search results. Some images tell their own story and don’t need a caption.

Alt Tags:

To make web images more accessible to users who rely a screen reader because of visual disabilities, include an “alt tag” and image description within the html source code used to draw an image into a web page. To some degree, this alt description can be very similar to the image’s normal caption but also needs to convey what can be seen in the image:

To understand if you need an alt tag, the W3C has put together an alt decision tree.