Free Image Description Generator

Alt text (alternative text) is a written description of an image that appears in HTML code. It serves two critical purposes: helping visually impaired users understand images through screen readers, and helping search engines understand and index your visual content. Alt text should be concise (under 125 characters), descriptive, and contextually relevant to the surrounding content. It's a required element for WCAG 2.1 Level A accessibility compliance.

Over 2.2 billion people worldwide have vision impairment or blindness. Image descriptions make your content accessible to screen reader users, ensuring equal access to information. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) require meaningful alt text for all non-decorative images. Beyond legal compliance, accessible content expands your audience, improves user experience, and demonstrates social responsibility. Good descriptions convey not just what's in the image, but its purpose and context.

Search engines can't 'see' images—they rely on text descriptions to understand visual content. Well-optimized image descriptions improve your SEO in multiple ways: they help images rank in Google Image Search (which drives 20-30% of web traffic), provide keyword relevance signals for page rankings, improve semantic understanding of your content, and increase dwell time through better user experience. Google's algorithm specifically rewards sites with comprehensive, accurate image descriptions.

Effective alt text is specific, concise, and contextual. Describe what's important about the image in relation to your content—not just what you see. Keep it under 125 characters for optimal screen reader performance. Include relevant keywords naturally, but avoid keyword stuffing. Don't start with 'image of' or 'picture of'—screen readers already announce it's an image. For decorative images, use empty alt text (alt=''). For complex images like charts, provide a longer description nearby or use longdesc attribute.