The Lost Art of the Alt Text: On Describing the World for Those Who Cannot See It
I have a small, daily ritual that feels increasingly like an act of quiet archaeology. It happens when I upload an image to this blog. A small, often overlooked text field appears, labeled ‘alt text’ or ‘alternative text’. For a moment, my job shifts from writer to describer. I must look at the image—a graph, a screenshot of a vintage website, a photo of a physical artifact—and translate its visual essence into words. This tiny act is one of the most profound and neglected forms of digital preservation we have.
Alt text was created as a pragmatic accessibility feature, a line of code that screen-reading software could vocalize for visually impaired users. Its primary function is inclusion, ensuring the digital world isn't built solely for the sighted. But in performing this function, it accidentally creates something else: a durable, human-readable record. Long after an image format becomes obsolete, long after a complex chart’s data points fade into unreadable blobs, the description remains. It is the caption that outlives the picture.
This is where the practice becomes an art. To write good alt text is to practice a form of radical clarity. You cannot be lazy or assume context. “Photo of a graph” is a failure. “Line graph showing the sharp decline in the number of active GeoCities pages from 2000 to 2009” is a record. It answers the who, what, and why. It describes the crucial information, not just the decorative container. In this way, the alt text field becomes a tiny metadata repository, a seed of context that prevents the image from becoming a silent, meaningless artifact in the future.
We often think of digital preservation in grand terms: petabyte-scale web crawls, format migration projects, distributed server farms. But preservation is also the sum of a million small, conscientious acts. Writing alt text is one of them. It is the decision to not let a piece of content be a black box. It is an act of care for an unknown future user—or perhaps for a future version of yourself, who might one day stumble upon an image file with a cryptic name and be grateful for the sentence that explains what it is you’re looking at, and why it ever mattered.
In a world saturated with images, we are creating a silent archive. The alt text field is our chance to whisper its descriptions into the record. It is a small, everyday commitment to ensuring that our digital commons remains not just stored, but intelligible. It is a promise that what we see can also, in some small way, be known.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: