Alt text is a short written description of an image, stored in the image’s HTML, that screen readers read aloud and search engines use to understand the image. In HubSpot, you can set alt text on images in pages, blog posts, emails and featured images.
Alt text has two jobs. For people using screen readers, it replaces the image with words, so they get the same information as everyone else. For search engines, it explains what the image shows, which helps the page and the image appear in relevant searches. It also appears if the image fails to load.
Good alt text describes what matters about the image in context, in a sentence or less. A chart should say what the chart shows. A product photo should name the product. Purely decorative images, such as background patterns, can have empty alt text so screen readers skip them, which is better than a meaningless file name.
Missing alt text is one of the most common accessibility issues on marketing sites, and accessibility is increasingly a legal and procurement requirement as well as a matter of courtesy. Featured images on blog posts are a frequent gap, because they are set in a separate field from the post body and easy to forget.
Make alt text part of publishing. Add it when an image is uploaded or placed, check featured images in the post settings, and review the most visited pages first when fixing older content.
Westbrook Clinics, a fictional healthcare group, was asked by a hospital partner for an accessibility review of its site. Most blog featured images had no alt text. The content team added it to the 50 most read posts in a week and made it a required step in their publishing checklist.
Select an image in the page, post or email editor to edit its alt text. For blog featured images, set it in the post settings where the featured image is chosen.
Every informative image should. Purely decorative images can use empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
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