The Ultimate Guide to Email Alt Text & Accessibility in Email

Images are everything in content creation.

This is especially true when it comes to email.

There are an estimated 136 billion images indexed in Google.

Images can make or break an email. They can elevate your newsletter, persuade subscribers to click “buy” and tell a story where words aren’t enough.

But, what happens when your images don’t work?

This can happen in two main scenarios:

1. Your subscriber is visually impaired.

2. Your subscriber’s email provider blocks the image.

If you run into this issue, your reader won’t be able to get the right context or message out of your email.

The solution?

Email alt text.

Knowing how to write alt text for images in your emails is crucial to making your emails accessible to a wider audience.

Whether you have subscribers who deal with visual impairments or email service providers who block images, an effective email alt text can help you provide context (and value) to more readers.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to master email alt text. You’ll learn best practices, legal compliance, AI integration, and more to create accessible and engaging emails this year.

TL;DR: Key Takeaways

• Alt text is a written description of an image, essential for ensuring email accessibility.

• Crafting accurate and concise alt text tailored for emails is crucial for engaging subscribers and improving the user experience.

• Testing and optimizing alt text across different email clients and assistive technologies is vital for ensuring accessibility and compliance.

• Understanding accessibility laws, regulations, and guidelines is crucial for avoiding legal issues and fostering inclusivity.

• AI-powered alt text generation offers time-saving benefits but may require human review and editing for optimal accuracy.

Understanding Alt Text

So, what exactly is alt text?

Alternate text, aka “image alt text” or “alt tags” is the text that appears in the place of an image on a web page or email if the image doesn’t load on the reader’s screen. The purpose of the image alt text is to describe an image to visually impaired people.

People with visual impairments and partial or full blindness can read the entire content on a web page or email if the creator of the content added image alt texts. 

Visually impaired people can use screen reader software and AI voice assistants that can simply read off-the-page content so they can still consume the content. 

This means when they come across a web page or an email with an image, instead of missing the context of the content, they’re able to hear what the image is to better understand the entire scope of the content.

Website owners also use image alt texts to help the page rank better in search engines. Search engines crawl websites to understand what content is on the page. They crawl the words on a page and also the image alt text.

Email Alt Text Best Practices

Don’t just write anything in your alt image tag, just because you have to. 

You need to know how to write the proper alt text in your images, otherwise you’ll confuse your readers. And, as the saying goes, ‘If you confuse, you lose.’

And in this case, you’ll lose your readers, and they may end up with a poor user experience. Worse yet, they might end up unsubscribing.

Here are some key guidelines to remember when crafting image alt texts in your emails:

1. Describe Images Accurately

The whole purpose of email alt text is to describe your images in detail.

Be specific with your language, use the image’s subject and the context to guide your email alt text copy.

Add in the context that relates to your email. 

If your image doesn’t include a recognizable place or person, then you should add context based on the content of your email. 

For instance, if your email is about how to write better email newsletters, and you have a stock image of a person typing on a computer, here’s how you could write the alt image text:

Wrong: “Woman typing on a computer.”

Right: “Woman writing the newsletter draft on her laptop.”

Notice how we added context to the image alt text in the second option? Even though the photo may just show a woman pretending to type on a fake computer, it’s important to add relevant details that make it complementary to the email you’re writing.

2. Keep Alt Text Concise (125 Characters Max)

You don’t need to write an essay in your alt text.

Aim to keep your image alt text under 125 characters.

For context, this entire section on “Keep Alt Text Concise” is 394 characters. Make it about one-quarter the length of this section of the blog post. Ideally, you should just have a single sentence.

If your image alt text is long-winded and hard to read out loud, then you need to shorten it.

3. Don’t Talk About How It’s a Picture

You need to describe your image in your alt text. Create an entire scene of what’s happening in detail. 

But, you don’t need to state that it’s an image.

For example, don’t start your alt text with, “This is an image of an orange cat on a rock” or “Picture of an orange cat on a rock.”

Simply start right in the middle of the image description.

In this case, simply write, “Orange cat on a rock.”

4. Only Use Keywords If You’re Publishing to the Web

If you’re writing your alt image text on an image being used on a web page, then it’s important to integrate keywords to help the page rank better in Google.

But, if you’re writing image alt text for images in an email, you don’t need to worry about keywords one bit.

Why?

People can’t search Google for emails.

But, there’s one exception: If you plan on posting your email as a blog post, then you should consider keywords.

How can you post your email simultaneously as a blog post?

With beehiiv, the newsletter platform built for growth.

When you send an email newsletter with beehiiv, by default, it also gets published as a blog post. beehiiv lets your emails live on forever, so your new readers don’t need to miss out on your past newsletters.

This means you get the maximum impact and ROI out of each send.

Get started with beehiiv today, for free.

5. Double Check Your Spelling

Always, always, always double-check your spelling.

Remember, your image alt text is primarily going to be listened to by visually impaired subscribers.

They’ll have screen readers that will speak the image alt text out loud. If you have a spelling mistake on a word, it may not make sense to the subscriber, and will likely be confusing.

This, in turn, means you’ll create a negative user experience. And, if you’re publishing your email to the web as a blog post with beehiiv, you’ll confuse search engine bots crawling your site.

They won’t understand the keywords and context of your content, preventing you from ranking high in search engines.

Remember to review your image alt text just like any other copy in your email. Always spell-check it.

6. Don’t Be Repetitive

Don’t be repetitive with your image alt text. If you have a few similar images, try mixing up the image alt texts a bit.

Remember, it all comes back to the user experience. Imagine if a subscriber heard this three times over and over again:

“Orange cat on a rock. Orange cat on a rock. Orange cat on a rock.”

It would start to get strange.

Instead, take note of the nuances of each image.

“Orange cat creeping on a large rock.”

“Orange cat laying across a large gray rock.”

“Orange cat peeking from behind a large rock nervously.”

Capture the individual details of each image, even if they’re slightly different. This will add to the user experience, allowing them to enter the content more easily.

7. You Won’t Need Email Alt Text On Every Image

Keep in mind, that you don’t always need to have an email alt text on your images. In most cases, you should include an alt text. But, there are exceptions. 

For example, if you have a strictly decorative image, then you don’t need to describe it. If it isn’t crucial to describe it within the context of the email, then skip over it.

Another reason you won’t need an alt image text is if you explained your image in detail in your email.

For example, if you say, “Here’s a picture below of my dad wearing his favorite baseball cap back in 1984,” then you don’t need to say the same thing again.

Screen readers will read your email copy and the alt-image text via voice to your visually impaired subscribers. So, if you describe that image in your copy, skip over it in your alt-image text. Otherwise, you’ll break best practice number 6, being repetitive.

Testing and Optimizing Email Alt Text

To create the best user experience for the widest range of subscribers, test your email alt text out.

This will help you understand what users see when an image is blocked and only the alt image text appears.

One way you can test out your email alt text is by using the tool Email On Acid to help you. It will automatically block out all the images in your email so you can see how the alt image text appears on each image.

Previewing your email alt text will give you a firsthand look at how your subscribers with accessibility issues or image-blocking software will receive and experience your email.

Next, analyze the performance of emails with image alt text and emails without any.

For example, you could analyze your email performance in beehiiv to track how many subscribers opened or clicked a specific email with image alt text versus an email without them to see how it impacts engagement.

Legal and Compliance Considerations

In a 2022 study of one million website homepages, only 77.8% had alt text within their images.

This means about a quarter of all website operators aren’t leveraging alt text. Anyone who is visually impaired or uses image-blocking technology isn’t getting a great user experience.

But, that’s not all.

If you aren’t leveraging image alt text, you could be breaking laws and guidelines.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

For example, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) include a set of standards for creating accessible digital content. Failure to comply could result in potential legal consequences.

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Plus, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal U.S. law that prohibits discriminating against people with disabilities. Not only could you potentially hurt your brand reputation by failing to comply with the ADA, but it also could result in legal action.

AI and Automation for Alt Text Generation

If you want to speed up your alt text creation, then one way to optimize the process is by leveraging artificial intelligence.

There are a variety of tools you can use to create alt image text demand with AI, like AltTextaii, Ahrefs, and Quattr.

The Benefit of AI-Generated Alt Text

Artificial intelligence can help you save time by creating alt-image texts for your different images. 

With these AI alt image text tools, you simply upload your picture, and it will output the exact alt image text you can use, saving you time.

The Challenge of AI Alt Text

AI-generated email alt text may help you save time, but it does come with its flaws.

For example, AI alt-image text generation tools are still relatively new, which means they aren’t the most accurate.

In most cases, a human should still review the alt-image text outputs the AI generates for accuracy, which means the time-saving capabilities aren’t quite as impressive (yet).

Final Thoughts

A picture is worth a thousand words.

But, if that picture can’t be seen, what’s it worth to your email subscriber?

Email alt text helps your readers understand the content of your image when they’re unable to view it, whether due to visual impairment or image blocking technology.

While it’s an extra step in your email creation process, adding in your alt image text is a vital part of creating a valuable and engaging user experience.

If you want to ensure you offer the best user experience for your readers, you need to use the right tools.

With beehiiv, you get access to a powerful email newsletter platform that’s focused on creating the best experience possible for subscribers.

Your email platform can be the difference between running a struggling email plan or a thriving email strategy.

If your goal is to do the latter, then come and thrive on the hive today!