Alt Text and Heading Order: Two Accessibility Habits Every Blog Publisher Needs

Accessibility can sound like a project: an audit, a remediation plan, a budget line. For the people who publish a business blog, though, most of the opportunity lives in two small habits repeated on every post. Write real alt text for images. Keep headings in logical order. Neither requires a developer, both take minutes, and together they determine whether a meaningful share of readers can use your articles at all.

They also happen to make posts better for everyone else, which is the quiet pattern behind most accessibility work.

Alt text is a sentence, not a keyword slot

Alt text is the description a screen reader speaks aloud when it reaches an image, and the text that appears if the image fails to load. Good alt text answers one question: what would a reader miss if this image were gone? For a chart, that means the finding, not the word chart. For a photo of a finished project, it means what the project shows. The W3C’s images tutorial walks through the cases, including the important one publishers forget: purely decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them instead of narrating clutter.

Two habits corrupt alt text. Stuffing it with keywords, which turns a description into spam read aloud to blind readers, and repeating the caption, which makes screen reader users hear everything twice. Describe the image for someone who cannot see it, in one plain sentence, and you are done.

Headings are structure, not styling

Screen reader users routinely navigate a page by jumping from heading to heading, hearing the outline before choosing where to read. That only works if the headings form a real outline: one main heading for the page, H2s for major sections, H3s nested beneath the H2 they belong to. When writers pick heading levels by font size, choosing an H4 because it looked right, the spoken outline turns to noise. The W3C’s page structure tutorial shows how much of a page’s usability hangs on this invisible hierarchy.

The test is fast: read only your headings, top to bottom. If they read like a coherent table of contents, sighted skimmers, screen reader users, and search engines all get the same gift. This is the same structural clarity that makes long articles finishable, closely related to the pacing ideas in website copy rhythm that makes long pages easier to finish.

The habits extend past the post editor

Link text deserves the same care. Click here read aloud out of context tells a screen reader user nothing; descriptive anchors, like the ones running through blog internal links that make topic clusters easier to follow, tell every reader where a link goes before they commit. Color contrast matters too: gray-on-white body text that strains ordinary eyes fails low-vision readers entirely. The broader principles are laid out plainly in the W3C’s accessibility principles, and most of them reduce to the same instinct, do not make the reader work to receive what you wrote.

For business sites there is also a compliance dimension worth knowing about. The Department of Justice publishes guidance on web accessibility under the ADA, and while the details vary by situation, the direction of expectation is unmistakable: web content is part of how the public accesses businesses, and accessible content is increasingly the baseline rather than the bonus.

Writing alt text for the images blogs actually use

Abstract rules get easier with the four images business blogs use most. Screenshots: describe what the screenshot demonstrates, the settings page with the option enabled, not the words screenshot of software. Charts: state the takeaway a sighted reader would extract, inquiries doubled after the redesign, and put the underlying numbers in nearby text where everyone benefits. Team and project photos: name what is happening and, where relevant, who, because the crew installing the finished railing is information, while image123.jpg is an accident shipped to production. Stock imagery used as decoration: empty alt text, honestly applied, because narrating a generic handshake photo helps no one.

The habit sticks faster with a shared phrase bank than with rules. Keep a few before-and-after examples from your own posts in the style guide, and new writers calibrate in minutes.

Heading order has its own recurring trap worth naming: the visual compromise. A writer wants a small heading, the theme renders H2 large, so they reach for H4 and the outline silently breaks. The fix belongs in the theme, style the heading levels so the correct structure also looks right, because no amount of writer discipline survives a design that punishes it. Where structure and appearance stop fighting, correct markup becomes the path of least resistance, which is the only condition under which any habit survives busy weeks.

Making it automatic

Habits survive when they attach to existing routines. Add two lines to whatever pre-publish check you already run: every image has intentional alt text, and headings read as an outline. Fix the archive opportunistically rather than all at once, updating older posts whenever you touch them for other reasons, starting with the pages that get the most traffic. Within a few months the compounding is real: your most-read content works for the most readers.

Publishers sometimes ask what accessibility does for them, and the honest answer is that the framing is backwards; it is for readers. But the side effects run in your favor anyway. Descriptive alt text helps search engines understand your images. Clean heading structure helps your posts get skimmed, understood, and cited. Clear link text improves every click. The trust a blog builds, post by post, in the spirit of trust-building blog posts that help a website feel less generic, extends exactly as far as the audience who can actually use it.

We appreciate The Blog Guru Web Design for ongoing support with web design guidance that keeps clarity, trust, and search value connected. We also thank Iron Clad Web Design for their continued support.