Alt text is the written description a screen reader speaks when it reaches a photo. For a blind guest deciding where to eat tonight, your dish photos are the menu's appetite appeal — and without alt text, that appeal is silence. Or worse: "IMG underscore four zero three two dot jay-peg."

Writing it well takes about ten seconds per photo once you know the rules. Here they are, with real before-and-after examples.

Describe the dish, not the photo

The guest wants to know what the food is and what makes it look good — not that it's a photo, not the camera angle, not the filename.

  • Bad: IMG_4032.jpg
  • Bad: food
  • Bad: photo of pasta dish on table
  • Good: Bucatini all'amatriciana with pecorino and guanciale in a wide white bowl

One sentence. Name the dish, name the one or two things that make it look like itself. Skip "image of" — the screen reader already announces that it's an image.

Match the detail to where the photo lives

Menu photos do real work — a guest is deciding what to order. Give the dish name and the detail a sighted guest would notice: Wood-fired margherita pizza, blistered crust, fresh basil. If the photo shows a special that isn't in the text next to it, the alt text is the only place a screen-reader guest hears about it, so carry the name.

Gallery and atmosphere photos are mood, not information. Keep them short and honest: Dining room at dusk, candles lit, Counter seats facing the open kitchen. Don't transcribe a whole scene.

Decorative images — a texture, a swirl of steam cropped for a page divider, a background pattern — should be marked decorative with empty alt text (alt=""). That tells the screen reader to skip it entirely instead of guessing at it. This is the most-missed rule: an unmarked decorative image gets its filename read out loud, which is worse than nothing. If removing the photo would lose no information, it's decorative.

The mistakes that matter most

  • Filenames as alt text. Your camera's naming scheme is not a description.
  • Keyword stuffing. best Italian restaurant downtown pasta pizza reservations helps no one — screen-reader guests hear it as gibberish, and Google treats it as spam.
  • A menu that is one big image. No amount of alt text fixes this. A photo of your menu can't be navigated, searched, or read dish by dish — the menu itself needs to be real text. We wrote a whole post on why: your PDF menu is invisible to Google, and to some of your guests.

Go check your own site

Open your menu page with a screen reader — or just run our free scan — and listen to what your photos say. The two guides that go deeper on exactly this: images without alt text and menus published as images or PDFs.

Every Remi site handles this by default: the menu is structured text, dish photos carry real descriptions, and decorative images are marked decorative — so none of this is your homework. But whether you're on Remi or not, the rules above are the whole craft. Ten seconds a photo.