Alt Text Generator
Describe what the image shows, add the page context if it helps, and get a tidied alt attribute you can paste straight into your markup.
Do
- Describe the meaning or function, not just the appearance.
- Keep it under 125 characters — screen readers read it aloud.
- For decorative images, use an empty alt (alt="") so they're skipped.
Don't
- Don't start with "image of" or "picture of" — it's redundant.
- Don't keyword-stuff — write for people, not crawlers.
- Don't leave alt missing on informative images.
About this tool
This is a text tidier, not an image recogniser. Nothing is uploaded and no model looks at your picture. Your own description is cleaned up: redundant openers such as “photo of” or “illustration showing” are stripped, the first letter is capitalised, a trailing full stop is dropped, any context you added is joined on, and the result is cut to 125 characters.
Two checkboxes change the advice rather than the text. Marking an image decorative returns an empty alt="", which is the correct answer for dividers and background flourishes. Marking that the image contains text raises a reminder to carry that wording across, because a screen reader cannot read pixels.
Everything runs in your browser — nothing you enter here is sent to a server or stored. Provided as is, without warranty.
What alt text is actually for
The useful question is not “what does this image look like” but “what would this page lose if the image vanished”. Answer that, and you have written the alt text. A hero shot of a laptop on a desk loses nothing, so it gets an empty alt. A pricing comparison chart loses the entire argument, so it needs the conclusion spelled out in words rather than a description of the bars.
Context changes the correct answer for the same file. A photograph of a founder used as a byline avatar wants the person name and nothing else. The same photograph on an about page, illustrating a story about the early days in a garage, wants the scene. This is why automated image captioning generally disappoints: it can describe pixels, but it cannot know what argument the surrounding paragraph is making. You can, which is why this tool takes your sentence and formats it instead of guessing.
A caveat that costs people real accessibility marks: an image wrapped in a link is not describing the picture, it is labelling the destination. If your logo in the header links home, the alt should be something like “QwertyBit, home”, not a description of the mark. Get this wrong and screen reader users hear a shape described where they expected a navigation label. The same applies to icon buttons: the alt is the action, not the glyph.
Keep it short, and skip the keyword stuffing. Search engines have treated stuffed alt attributes as spam for well over a decade, and the people who suffer are the ones listening to it read aloud at 300 words per minute. If accessibility is on your list this sprint, the WCAG contrast checker covers the other failure that shows up on nearly every landing page we audit, and the readability test will tell you whether the copy around the image is as clear as the image description.
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