Social media alt text: accessibility and publishing basics

Social media marketers can make image-based posts more accessible by adding alternative text, according to a guide from Sprout Social Insights. The written description gives people who cannot see an image a way to understand what it conveys. Sprout also notes that leaving out alt text can weaken a post’s chances of appearing in search.

Alt text is attached to an image rather than written as the post’s caption. Screen readers can use it to communicate visual information through speech or braille. It can also help people with low vision or those browsing with images turned off understand a post when its visual content is unavailable to them.

Accessibility is the primary reason to provide these descriptions. Sprout cites a World Health Organization estimate that 1.3 billion people live with a significant disability. Many people use screen readers, making image descriptions an important part of the information available to them when they encounter visual posts.

A useful description focuses on what the image shows. Sprout advises against treating the field as another caption or using it for commentary, image credits, keywords or calls to action. Those additions can introduce unnecessary information for screen reader users instead of explaining the visual content.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Threads and Pinterest offer native fields for alt text. Marketers can enter descriptions within each app as they publish, or use a publishing platform to add them across multiple networks. Sprout says its Essentials plan supports manual entry: users open an image in Compose, select the option to add alt text, write a description and save it.

Sprout also offers an AI Assist feature that analyzes an image and produces a draft description. The user can then review and edit that text before publishing. Both approaches place the description in the image’s alt text field, separate from the main post copy.

What this means for marketers

Make image descriptions part of the regular publishing routine rather than relying on captions to convey visual details. Whether writing manually or reviewing an AI-generated draft, check that the alt text describes the image and leaves out material better suited to the post itself.