Alt text (alternative text) is a short description attached to an image. Screen readers read it aloud to people who cannot see the picture, and search engines and some social networks use it to understand what the image shows. Most networks let you add alt text when you publish a photo, and websites add it in the image settings.
For a small business, alt text does two jobs at once. It makes your posts usable for people with visual impairments, and it adds meaningful words that help your images and pages turn up in search. It takes seconds and costs nothing.
Example: instead of leaving a product photo undescribed, a ceramics shop writes: “Hand-made blue ceramic mug with a white glaze rim on a wooden table.” This is clearer for a screen reader user and more useful for search than “mug1.jpg”.
Good practice: describe what matters in the image in one or two plain sentences, avoid stuffing keywords, and skip phrases like “image of”, since screen readers already announce that it is an image.
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