Running Time: 40s 

 

This video demonstrates how to add an ALT tag to an image. This is an important thing to do for a few reasons covered below the video and should not be ignored.  NB Click on  in the bottom right of the video to view fullscreen

 

 

About this video

This video assumes you are already logged into the Sketchanet editor and have a page open for editing. To learn how to do this see here.

 

The importance of alt tags

 

An ALT tag, also known as "alt attribute" and "alt description," is an HTML attribute applied to image tags, to describe an image. Search Engines (like Google), and Screenreaders (for Visually impaired people), don't know what an image looks like unless you tell them.

 

Search Engines
If you have ever done a search on Google images, you are actually doing a search for the ALT tag assigned to the image. If there is no ALT tag, your image is not going to come up in the search results.

 

Screenreaders

Visually impaired people use the Internet, but they can't see it - they use screenreaders that read the contents of the page to them out load. A screenreader has no idea what an image looks like - not unless you tell it. This is where an image ALT tag comes in. You describe the image in the ALT tag, and a screenreader will read out this description.

 

How to add them

Simply insert a description into the Image ALT tag field when an image is uploaded to the editor. Clicking edit on an image that has already been placed on your website will give you this option again. Watch the video above to see exactly how this is done.