AI alt text generator

Alt text

How this AI alt text generator is set up

There is no upload panel on this page, and that is deliberate rather than missing. The engine takes text and returns text, so you brief it in writing instead of handing it a file. Describe the picture and say what it is doing on the page, and it drafts the alt attribute.

Everything happens in the box above. The brief goes to our AI server, the result comes back in the second panel, and you copy it into your markup. Free, 5 runs per rolling 24 hours, up to 12,000 characters per brief, no account.

First decision

Sort every image before you write a single brief

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether generated alt text helps or clutters. Put each image into one of four buckets.

Decorative

Remove the image mentally and nothing is missing. It gets an empty attribute with nothing between the quotes, and it never goes near this tool.

Informative

Taking it away loses something a reader needs. This is the ordinary case, and the one the brief format below is built for.

Functional

The image is a link or a button. The attribute has to say where it goes or what it does, not what it depicts.

Text in a graphic

A quote card, a banner, a screenshot of a message. The wording has to be carried across, so it belongs in the brief verbatim.

How to

How to use the AI alt text generator in three steps

One pass per image, or one pass for a set of related images if you ask for a line each.

Step 1

Confirm the image is informative or functional. A decorative image needs an empty attribute, not a generated sentence.

Step 2

Write the brief: subject, purpose on the page, what the nearby copy already covers, and any names or wording that must survive.

Step 3

Read the draft on the page rather than in isolation, delete anything the caption repeats, and paste it into the markup.

The brief

A brief that produces something you can paste

Four lines is usually enough. Leaving any of them out is the main reason a result comes back generic.

Subject line

What is actually in the frame. Be specific about anything that matters and skip anything that does not.

Purpose line

Why this image is on this page. Illustrating an argument, showing the product being sold, standing in for a heading.

Context line

What the caption and surrounding paragraph already say, so the attribute does not repeat them.

Must-include line

Product names, people's names, the exact text inside a graphic. Anything not in the brief cannot appear in the output.

The checklist

Check the draft against four rules

Run these on every result before it goes into a template. They come from the accessibility guidance, and they are quick.

Front-loaded

The point of the image sits at the start of the string. A listener does not skim to find it.

No image of prefix

Cut any opening that announces the medium. That announcement already happens without you.

Not a duplicate

Compare the attribute to the caption and the adjacent sentence. Overlap is noise on a screen reader.

Not carrying data

A chart's numbers do not belong here. The attribute says what the chart is, and the figures go into text or a table nearby.

At scale

Working through a backlog of images

There is no plugin, no media-library scan and no bulk mode here, so a backlog is worked by hand. That sounds slower than it is, because the triage step removes a surprising share of the images before any writing happens. Decorative dividers, background textures and repeated brand marks all resolve to an empty attribute.

For what remains, group images that share a purpose into one brief and ask for a separate line per image. One run can cover a set of product shots or a row of team photos. With 5 runs per rolling 24 hours, that is the difference between clearing a page and clearing an image.

Straight answer

What the AI alt text generator cannot know

It cannot see the image, so it cannot correct a brief that is wrong. Describe the chart as showing growth when it shows decline and the attribute will say growth. Every result needs looking at next to the actual picture, which is the one check that cannot be delegated.

It also does not make a page compliant. What comes back is a draft written from your description, and no standard is claimed to be met by using it. The guidance itself sets no character limit either, so treat a shorter result as better only when the point still survives.

In practice

Write the attribute while you still know why the image is there

The purpose line in the brief is easy to write on the day you place an image and hard to write a year later, when the reasoning behind the choice has gone. Accessibility guidance makes the same point: alt text written during authoring is better than alt text retrofitted during an audit.

If you are retrofitting anyway, read the paragraph the image sits next to before you write the brief. That paragraph usually tells you what the image was for, and it also tells you what the attribute must not repeat. Search engines read alt text to work out an image's subject as well, so one pass serves both the people who need it and the crawlers that use it.