Field Guide Term:
Alt Tag

Not to be confused with the Alt Right, the Alt Tag is a harmless, but important piece of HTML code to help site visitors as well as search bots to understand what the nature of an image is.  For instance the Alt Tag for this image should be something like “Yellow New York fire hydrant.”

Yellow New York fire hydrant.

This helps visually disabled site visitors understand the image.  It might also help visitors see what an intended image is if there is any trouble downloading the image.  The alt tag is located within the img tag in html.  The full image tag will look something like this:

<img class=”aligncenter wp-image-30088 size-medium lazyloaded” src=”hydrant.jpg”  alt=”Yellow New York fire hydrant.” />