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Images

Guidelines for including images in digital products.

Best Practices

  • Use meaningful images to enhance the content.
  • Avoid decorative images.
  • Avoid using images of swamps, alligators, beads, or sunset images unless they are real information.

Content Images

Content images are images which have meaningful information in them.

  • Content images should contain Alt Text.
  • Apply img-fluid to images to make them responsive. This makes the image fit its parent container. Height is automatically adjusted by the browser to preserve the aspect ratio.
  • You may optionally add the rounded class to put rounded corners on the image.
Person using a laptop, with notebooks and a pen.
<div class="row mb-12">
  <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-4">
    <img
      alt="Laptop, filled coffee cup, notepad, pen, and phone on a desk."
      class="img-fluid rounded"
      src="/img/photos/pexels-photo-5077047.jpeg" />
  </div>
</div>

Decorative Images

Non-content images may be requested by the Stakeholders and Project Owners. In this case, consider the following guidelines:

  • Try to use images which do not distract from the content.
  • Content images should use Alt Text with an empty value.
<div class="row mb-12">
  <div class="col-12 col-md-6 col-lg-4">
    <img
      alt=""
      class="img-fluid rounded"
      src="/img/photos/pexels-photo-2317711.jpeg" />
  </div>
</div>

Writing Alt Text

When writing alt text, keep the following in mind:

  • Be specific; describe the image for users who cannot see them.
  • Keep it short as possible, but descriptive. Try to keep it around 150 characters.
  • Don’t include phrases like “Image of…” or “Picture of…”
  • Use a simple, descriptive sentence and the appropriate punctuation.
  • Alt text describes the image, it’s not a caption.
  • Alt text does not need to include any copyright information.

Resources

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