By Becky Bernauer, Web and Accessibility Coordinator, Minnesota IT Services Partnering with Minnesota Department of Health

Alternative text (alt text) is a valuable tool that ensures non-visual readers and other users of assistive technology (AT) get information from pictures, graphics, and other images. Good alt text also provides other benefits depending on the document type.

Instructions for Adding Alt Text in Microsoft Office

This process works for all Microsoft content creation programs, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

• Right-click (Shift + F10) the image and choose Format Picture.
• In the Format Picture pane, select the Layout & Properties icon.
• Select Alt Text.
• In the Description field enter a description of the image.
  • Leave the Title field blank. Best practice: Limit alt text to 150 characters or less.

Must Do

• Keep it short and meaningful.
  • Example: "Hmong children fishing"
    • This example lets the reader know specific, such as that the children are Hmong and they are fishing.
• If the image has text on it, include the text in the alt text description.

Things to Think About

• Avoid using symbols as part of your alt text. Some symbols will not be read.
• Do not provide a URL as part of the alt text. Assistive technology user cannot follow a link that is in the alt text.
• Stay away from images of text. Text cannot be easily copied and used by the audience.

Decorative Images

• If you have an image that does not provide information and is purely decorative in nature, the alt text for the image in Word, PowerPoint and emails should be the word "decorative."
• For PDFs, remove the alt text for decorative images, then mark as background (an artifact) in the PDF.

Use Alt Text When a Short Summary is Not Possible

If a chart or graph cannot be easily summarized, you should:

• provide an explanation of the graphic in the surrounding text, and/or
• provide a table of the data that created the chart or graph directly below the graphic when possible, and/or
• provide a link to a long description directly below the image.

A long description is a link to detailed information, such as a webpage that contains a table of the data that created a chart or graph that was too big to include in the document.

A chart with many data points might have a data table that can be provided in one of these ways:

• below the graphic
• in the appendices of the document
• via a link to a web page containing the data table.

The alt text should provide the location of the data/long description. Examples of alt text (for the chart) when providing a data table:

• Chart X, the data for this chart can be found in Table X below.
• Chart X, the data table for this chart can be found in Appendix X of this document.
• Chart X, the data for this chart can be found by following the link provided below this chart.

In some cases, such as an organizational chart that was created in Visio with objects that cannot be properly tagged or organized, you may need to provide the same information with text in a Word document or Web page. This allows the person using assistive technology to get the information in a manner that is understandable, similar to giving an explanation over the telephone.

Other Resources

Visit the links below for more information:

• WebAIM article on alternative text (https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/)
• Minnesota's Office of Accessibility Website (https://mn.gov/mnit/programs/accessibility/)