Accessibility

Alt text, or alternative text, is descriptive text that conveys the meaning of an image in digital content, such as on a web page or app. It's designed to make visual content accessible to people with vision disabilities, such as those who use screen readers, and in situations where the image can't be displayed. When screen readers like Microsoft Narrator, JAWS, and NVDA come across content with alt text, they read it aloud so people can understand what's on the screen.

On many website platforms, it's possible to leave out alt text, which is a detriment to users that interpret webpages through screenreaders. Builder is designed with integrated alt text tools to reduce the possibility of rendering images without alt text. The way Builder manages assets like images means that you'll only need to enter the alt text once, no matter how often that image is used throughout the site.

Alt Text with Builder

Let's say you want to include this image of Old Main on your website:

You can incorporate this image into your page by selecting it as a hero image, a preview image, or by including it as an Image block, within an Image Gallery block, or in an Offset Preview block. No matter which method you choose, you can add alt text the same way: by attaching the alt text to the image itself.

You can do this while you're in the middle of editing a webpage. Click on the image you've selected, and it will open a panel where you can edit the image's title, alt text, caption, and credit fields.

If the image doesn't display in the panel, and you'd like to see it to write accurate alt text, you can click the panel icon to slide the image into view.

You can also click the icon with the arrow to open the image in a separate tab. On this screen, you're seeing the image open in "Assets," where all the site images reside.

If you try to save your entry without providing alt text, you'll get a save error.