How to Write Effective Image Descriptions?

Creating accessible content on the internet is more important than ever.

If you’re a content creator, or if you just post visuals online, you might be interested in learning about image descriptions — textual explanations of images that help people with visual impairments better understand what’s in a picture.

Including these descriptions makes your content more accessible and opens it up to a broader audience.

Let’s dive into why image descriptions matter, how to write them effectively, and some quick tips to get you started!

What Are Image Descriptions?

Simply put, image descriptions are short pieces of text that describe what’s happening in an image.

Here’s an example:

[Image Description: A photograph of a woman wearing a red jacket and a blue scarf, standing on a snowy hill. She’s holding a hot chocolate mug, and behind her, a large pine tree is dusted with snow. There’s a distant mountain range in the background under a clear blue sky.]

These descriptions help people who can’t see the image get a sense of what it looks like.

But they’re also helpful for others, like people with low internet speed who turn off images to save bandwidth, or people…