What is alt text?
A short text description of an image, set via the `alt` attribute, used by screen readers and search engines to understand what the image shows.
<img src="/logo.svg" alt="Context.dev wordmark logo">. The alt attribute is an accessibility requirement, screen readers read it aloud, and an SEO signal, Google uses it to understand image content for image search and to interpret pages where the image carries meaning.
Good alt text describes what the image conveys in context, not literally what's in the frame. "Context.dev wordmark logo" is better than "purple text saying Context.dev." Decorative images (a divider line, a background pattern) should have alt="" so screen readers skip them, never omit the attribute entirely.
For programmatic content (image search, RAG pipelines, AI agents), alt text is often the only structured information available about an image. Sites that take alt seriously (Stripe, GitHub, Apple) get a meaningful boost in image-search visibility just from being thorough.