Best practices

Accessible images and videos: alternatives and captions

An image without an alternative or a video without captions excludes part of your audience. The right reflexes.

Visual and audiovisual content needs alternatives to be accessible to all. It is also an asset for search ranking, because engines do not see the image.

Images

An informative image gets a concise text alternative that conveys the same information. A purely decorative image gets an empty alternative, so screen readers ignore it. Complex graphics deserve a more detailed description nearby.

Videos

Spoken videos must offer synchronised captions. A full text transcript also helps, and lets the content be indexed. For essential content, audio description describes what is shown.

Audio

A podcast or audio file benefits from a transcript, useful for deaf or hard-of-hearing people as well as those who prefer to read.