Describing What the Eye Skips: An Editor's Approach to Alt Text for UK Brands

Alt text has an unusual position in a brand's written estate. It is commissioned late, drafted by whoever is nearest the content management system, and reviewed by almost nobody. Yet it is read aloud, in full, by software that offers the listener no picture to glance at and no caption to fall back on. A vague or cluttered description does not merely look careless on the page; it removes the image from the experience altogether.

That makes alt text an editorial problem before it is a technical one. The complying is easy enough—a field, a character count, a tick in the audit. The writing is harder, because a description has to do two jobs at once: convey the information the picture carries, and do so in a register a listener will recognise as belonging to the brand.

The Purpose Comes Before the Phrasing

Before a word is drafted, an editor should ask what the image is doing on the page. A product photograph on a retail listing exists to show the object in detail. A photograph of a named person on a team page exists to identify them. A decorative band of colour behind a heading exists for no informational reason at all, in which case the correct alt attribute is an empty one. That last point is the most frequently ignored: silence is a legitimate editorial decision, and a better one than a description invented to fill a field.

Where the image carries information not repeated in the surrounding copy—a chart, a diagram, a screenshot of a form—the alt text is not the right container for everything. A short description pointing to a fuller account nearby serves the reader better than a paragraph crammed into an attribute. Judgement about where information belongs is precisely what an editor is for.

Where Voice Belongs, and Where It Does Not

A brand's tone of voice guidance will usually say something about warmth, directness, or wit. None of that should be bolted onto a description that needs to be plain. There is no useful place for a pun in the alt text of a safety notice, and a listener who has asked for an image description has not asked for a second slogan.

Voice, in this context, shows up in smaller decisions: the rhythm of a sentence, the choice between a formal and an ordinary noun, whether the writer says a woman in her thirties or a customer. A retailer that addresses its buyers as 'you' everywhere else need not do so here; a charity that writes with warmth in its body copy can let a sentence end on a human detail rather than a list of objects. The test is recognition rather than performance. If a listener heard three descriptions from three organisations, they should be able to tell which one came from yours—and not because it contained a tagline.

Three Habits That Flatten the Copy

Keyword stuffing. The temptation to carry search terms into the alt field is persistent, and it is a mistake on two counts. Screen-reader users are subjected to a list of phrases written for a crawler, and the practice is discouraged in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) for precisely that reason. Search benefit belongs in the page copy, not in a description meant for a person.

Opening with 'image of' or 'picture of'. Most screen readers already announce the presence of a graphic. Repeating it wastes the first two words of a short budget. Begin with the subject.

Tone mismatch. A jokey description on a page about bereavement support, or a stiff corporate register on a page aimed at children, tells the listener that the alt text was written by a different department from the rest of the site. Consistency of register is a form of respect.

A Worked Pass

Consider a draft of the kind that arrives in an inbox:

Image of smiling business woman in modern London office, professional, teamwork, synergy, corporate

Set aside the opening phrase and the trailing keywords and almost nothing remains. A revised version might read:

A project manager at a desk, mid-sentence, gesturing towards a printed schedule while two colleagues lean in.

What has changed is not length but specificity. The second version tells a listener where the people are, what they are doing, and how they are arranged—the information the photograph actually supplies. It also sounds like writing rather than tagging.

A second pass should then check the description against its surroundings. If a caption directly beneath the image says the same thing, one of the two is redundant and the alt text can be shortened. If the body copy already names everyone in the picture, the description need not repeat the names. Editing is as much about removal as addition.

Working Alongside Designers and Content Teams

The practical obstacle is rarely skill; it is ownership. Alt text tends to fall between the design team, who selected the image, and the content team, who publish the page. A short working agreement resolves most of it: whoever commissions the image supplies a factual note of what it shows, and an editor turns that note into a description in the house register. Where a brand publishes at volume, a one-page guide with three good examples will do more than a policy document nobody reads.

A Short Editorial Checklist

• Does the description begin with the subject rather than with 'image of'?
• Would a listener who cannot see the page understand what the picture contributes?
• Has every keyword written for a search engine been removed?
• Is the register consistent with the page around it?
• Are names, places and figures spelled as they appear elsewhere on the site?
• Is any information better placed in a caption or the body copy?
• For decorative images, is the attribute empty?
• Has the text been heard aloud, by a screen reader or a colleague reading it, rather than only read on screen?

The last item matters most. Alt text is the one form of brand copy that is always read aloud, and hearing it is the quickest way to notice the sentence that has been assembled rather than written. Under the Equality Act 2010, and for any organisation holding itself to WCAG, the description is part of the service being offered. It is also, simply, copy—and it deserves the same care as the paragraph beneath it.