Callum McMenamin — 28 June 2025
Alt text for social media images makes them accessible to blind people. This guide explains how to add alt text to your social media images, and why it’s important.
https://www.openaccess.nz/blog/accessible-social-media-alt-text/
I only read the slides, since I prefer reading to video , but I loved this slide presentation. Take a look if you need to provide alt text for images that include people.
GAAD 2025 – A2: The Discomfort of Describing Persons in Alt Text
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Penn State University
https://mediaspace.umn.edu/media/t/1_544og2vi
The preview reads:
This session will review strategies for determining which qualities of a image of person should be described in image alt text. The session will also explore how cultural preconceptions may make this task a challenge, even an uncomfortable one, but an important one for helping users understand the context of what the image conveys.
TLDR; If you don’t add alt text to your LinkedIn images, the default will not be blank, but will call you out to visually impaired users.
I was looking at some company posts, and before I share them, I check to make sure that whoever posted them added the tags. I checked the view-source and was surprised to find that defail alt text, instead of being blank, was “No alternative text description for this image”.
Now, sometimes a blank alt text is perfectly acceptable (See W3C alt decision tree). The VIP (visually impaired person) would just go on, and hopefully the context or the post would contain all the necessary info.
But LinkedIn, instead of leaving it blank, tells them you just didn’t think about it!
Now, just because you forgot, it’s easy to go back and edit that – you can fix the alt text.
1. Go to your post, and click edit
2. In the top corner of your image, click edit
3. Fix your alt tag – make it blank if it’s a decorative non essential image and all text is contained in the post.
If there is a lot of text in the image, here’s a shortcut -save the image and upload to https://www.imagetotext.info/ to get the text from the image. Be sure to add any descriptive text to add the context of why you put the image up there in the first place!
billcreswell.words 