The Unassuming Alt Text: A Vast and Silent Library of the Everyday
We scroll past them every day, our cursor gliding over images on news sites, social feeds, and government portals. They are the tiny descriptions tucked into the code of a webpage, the alt text, designed to speak for an image when the image itself cannot be seen. Most of us, if we think of them at all, consider them a matter of basic accessibility—a box to be checked. But I’ve come to see this humble act of captioning as one of the most profound, and perilously overlooked, acts of digital preservation we perform.
Think of the sheer volume of visual information we now produce. Charts detailing municipal budgets, photos from a local park’s renovation, graphs tracking air quality over time. These are public records, as vital as any typed memo. Yet the images themselves are often context-poor; a JPEG doesn’t know it’s a chart of 2023 Q2 budget allocations. Its meaning is locked in the visual. For a screen reader user, that meaning is unlocked only by the alt text. But its utility doesn’t end there. This text becomes the image’s sole, searchable provenance for future historians, researchers, or even a curious citizen in a decade’s time.
The Ghost in the Descriptive Machine
The peril, however, lies in its quiet fragility. Alt text is often an afterthought, leading to a spectrum of loss. At one end, the void: an empty alt="" tag, a deliberate silence where a description should be. At the other, the automated description: the well-intentioned but context-blind AI that labels a complex flow chart simply as “a chart.” Both are forms of data decay, happening at the very moment of creation. We are building a vast visual archive and systematically mislabeling its contents, creating a future where the picture exists but its story is lost.
This makes the human writing alt text an unsung archivist. The volunteer describing a community event photo on a city website isn’t just providing access; they are weaving a narrative thread into the digital fabric. They are deciding what is worth noting—the “mayor cutting a ribbon” versus the “newly planted oak tree in the background.” These choices, these tiny acts of curation, shape how this moment will be understood later. They are building a library of the everyday, one succinct sentence at a time.
In an age obsessed with preserving the grand spectacle of our digital lives, the unassuming alt text asks us to consider the micro. It is a pact we make with the future, a promise that the data we create today won’t just be stored, but will remain intelligible. It is a reminder that preservation isn’t always about saving a file from a dying format; sometimes, it’s about ensuring the story within the file doesn’t fade away, unseen and unread.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: