Accessibility is good for society and for SEO

I think we can all agree that images are a vital part of modern web design. They add a touch of personality, can demonstrate complex skills and ideas + processes, and overall, make your message more engaging.

…that is, unless your visitor is someone with visual impairment.

Accessibility is something that still isn’t talked about nearly enough in online design and marketing spaces. Paying attention to accessibility practices should be a no-brainer, though.

The folks behind Giving A Damn About Accessibility define digital accessibility as:

“the inclusive practice of ensuring that everyone has equal access to information, functionality, and experience on digital platforms.”

Basically, if you believe in a more inclusive world, caring about digital accessibility is a MUST for your website.

Yet, even if we look at it from a purely capitalist standpoint, there’s still good reason to care: ignoring accessibility best practices means you'll prevent millions of people from finding out about what you do.

Yes, that’s millions–or even billions, depending on the choices you and your design team make. An estimated 7 million people live with visual impairment, and an estimated 350 billion people have some form of colorblindness. No matter how much you’ve niched down, there HAS to be someone who needs your expertise in a population that large.

I can’t hope to cover all of the ground in accessibility in this one email, especially when there are tremendous resources, like Giving a Damn About Accessibility, that do it better. However, there’s one thing you can focus on that’s fairly simple, and it’ll not only improve your website’s accessibility, but also boost your SEO: your images. 

Here are a few website image best practices for accessibility and SEO:

Give your image file a short-but-descriptive filename before you upload it to your website. Not only does this make them more meaningful for folks using screen readers, it also makes them more meaningful to search engines. Bonus: try adding a relevant SEO search term, with the words separated by dashes (example: best-web-designer-portland.jpg).

Add alt text to your images! You’ll help folks with visually impairments by providing their screen readers with a description of the image. And, Google and other search engines also rely on image filename descriptions and alt text to understand what an image is about. If you're not giving your image a custom filename or alt text, you're missing out on an opportunity to deepen Google's understanding of who your content is for. 

Keep in mind, too, that descriptive filenames and alt text are fail-safes if your web host lags, and a page doesn't load an image (or three! 😱) properly. 

Resize images to between 1500 and 2500 pixels on their longest side. If your images are too large, it slows down the loading time of your website, and your search engine ranking takes a hit. Too small, however, and images look blurry and grainy. This size range better balances load times with image quality.

Use the right file format for the right image. Be sure to use JPGs for larger images–especially if they’re photographs. On a recent project, I noticed that a client’s huge image library was due to their gorgeous photographs being in PNG format… which meant that each photo was 4-5 times larger than an equivalent JPG! However, PNGs and GIFs are fine for smaller images, as well as graphics that need a transparent background.

So, if alt text is that valuable, how do you write it? 

First off, remember who you’re writing alt text for – and no, I don’t mean search engines.  I’m talking about the real humans who can’t see your images.  It doesn’t need to be complicated: simply tell those folks what you see in the image! 

Additionally, just like naming your image files, you’ll want to keep your alt text short and descriptive. And, if it makes sense, use 1-2 relevant search keywords.

Above all, don’t resort to spammy "keyword stuffing" in an attempt to rank higher in search. Keyword stuffing doesn’t work for written content–and hasn’t for quite some time!–and it won’t work for your alt text, either. 

If juggling all of those details feels overwhelming, you can (gasp!) try an AI Alt Text Generator like this one. Don’t get me wrong, I still have big problems with generative AI, but even I can admit that building basic text descriptions of images is the kind of task we should be handing off to computers–y'know, instead of having an AI churn out bland, worthless creative.

No matter what you choose to do on the web, you’ll serve everyone (including yourself!) better when you make accessibility–and all of the people it helps–a priority.