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Alt text - Instagram Glossary

Alt text is a written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers and used by Instagram to understand image content. Instagram generates it automatically, but the auto-generated version is generic - custom alt text is both an accessibility requirement and a classification signal.

The accessibility case is the primary one and does not need a marketing justification: a visually impaired follower gets nothing from a post whose alt text says 'may be an image of text'. Writing a real description is the difference between including that person and not.

The secondary benefit is that alt text is one of the few places you can describe an image in plain language for the system as well as the person. Describe what is actually in the frame rather than stuffing keywords - a description that does not match the image helps nobody and is trivially detectable.

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