It provides more information about the function and content of images.īy adding alternative text, the content is accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired.Īnother benefit of alternative text: if an image can’t be downloaded or if a user has disabled images from displaying (as in an email app), the alternative text will display where the image would normally show up.Īlternative text also provides semantic meaning to search engines who can’t “see” images. That’s not a lot of progress in two years.Īlternative text allows you to add text descriptions to photos, diagrams, and illustrations. Less than one in three Facebook users add alternative text to images. It’s clear there’s more work to do to educate Facebook users about adding alternative text to images. Not as much movement as I hoped, but small steps. The final results were more positive than the first poll. Two years after my first poll, I decided it was time to repeat the poll. To teach people about the new feature, I published this post with how-to’s for adding alternative text to images in Facebook.

It’s something Facebook users had been asking for over the years.Ĭertainly it didn’t receive the wide publicity that happened when Twitter announced the alternative text feature for images a couple of years prior. I don’t know why Facebook doesn’t promote their alternative text for images features. If you share images on Facebook, do you add alternative text to the image? Which is why a few years ago, I ran a poll on Facebook and Twitter whether people added alternative text (alt text) to the photos they post on Facebook.Įvery person who responded to the poll said they didn’t know they could. Though the feature has been out for several years, few people know about it. When I was chatting with a friend about alternative text (alt text) for images, I asked them if they knew they could add alt text to images on Facebook.

How to add text to photos on facebook