Overview
Individuals who cannot see images in Microsoft Word documents rely on the author to provide alternative text to describe the content of an image. The alternative text used should describe important aspects of the image, but be brief enough to not overburden the user. When a screen reader encounters an image in a Word document, the alternative text will be read out to the user, helping them understand what's going on in the image.
Note:
If you're using images in a decorative context and they don't offer any informative content (for example, a colored separator bar image used between paragraphs of content), alternative text is not required.
Add alternative text to an image
To add alternative text to an image in Word:
- Insert the picture you want to use into the document.
- Right-click the picture, and then, in the menu that pops up, click .
- In the "Format Picture" pane, click .
- Click the arrow next to to expand the alternative text options.
In the "Description" field, enter a description of the image.
If you have a detailed image that requires a long description, you may want to enter a brief summary of the description in the "Title" field. This allows users to decide if they need the full description of the image or not. Otherwise, you can leave the "Title" field blank.
- When finished, close the "Format Picture" pane.
Note:
In the Microsoft 365 version of Word, you can also add alternative text for images by right-clicking the image and clicking . Keep in mind that this option doesn't provide a title field; for detailed images that may need a title, follow the steps above to add alternative text and a title.
For more about creating alternative text for images, see General guidelines for creating accessible documents.
This is document aqjs in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2022-11-14 14:44:31.
Some graphics in Word 2013 are used as text decorations, other graphics are extensions of your text. To best reference such an image, you should add a caption. The caption’s text can identify the image with boring text (“Figure 1”), or it can explain what’s in the image (“John touches the plant that he swore to us
was not poison sumac”). To add a caption to an image, heed these steps:
Click to select the graphic.
Choose your desired graphic.
From the References tab’s Captions group, click the Insert Caption button.
The Captions dialog box appears.
In the Caption text box, type the figure caption text.
Windows supplies the figure number in the form of the text, Figure 1. You cannot remove that reference, but you can place a check mark in the Exclude Label From Caption box to shrink it down to just a number.
Choose a position for the caption from the Position drop-down list.
The caption position is relative to the figure.
Click the OK button.
The caption is applied to the figure.
The caption itself is a special type of text box, which resembles a graphical image but contains text. It’s not grouped with the image, so if you move or resize the image, you have to move or resize the caption box as well. To avoid that, you can group the two items.
An advantage to applying captions this way is that you can create a list of captions or figures for your document, summarizing them all along with their page references. To do so, use the Insert Table of Figures button, found in the References tab’s Captions group.
About This Article
This article is from the book:
- Word 2013 For Dummies ,
About the book author:
Dan Gookin wrote the original For Dummies book, DOS For Dummies, in 1991 and launched a phenomenon. Since then, his list of bestsellers continues to grow. There are more than 12 million copies of his books in print, translated into 32 languages. Dan welcomes visitors at his website, www.wambooli.com.
This article can be found in the category:
- Word ,