Your site exists in several languages, but do your images have alt text in each one? A screen reader reading English alt text on a French page is a degraded experience for everyone.
The rule: the page’s language
Alt text must be written in the language of the page where the image appears, not the administrator’s. Text in the wrong language is pronounced badly by the screen reader and is less useful to search engines.
Why it is tricky
- WordPress stores a single alt text per image in the media library.
- The same image can be used on the French page and on the English page.
- Translation plugins offer media translation to varying degrees: check the setting in Polylang or WPML.
Three approaches
- Duplicate the image per language (media translation): each version has its own alt text.
- Pick a main language for the media library and accept a compromise on translated pages.
- Have the text written in the language of the content that uses the image, with a tool that reads that language.
What SafeAlt handles
SafeAlt writes in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. The language used is that of the content where the image appears (Polylang and WPML are supported), otherwise your site’s language. For any other language, texts are written in English.
Remember to review texts in languages you do not master: an AI can be wrong, and review by a native speaker remains the best check.
Where to start
- Check the media translation setting in your translation plugin.
- Describe your business in SafeAlt’s settings for consistent texts.
- Run processing on your most visited pages, in each language.
See also the Languages and context page of the documentation.
