What is alt text?

Alternative text carries the information an image conveys, which is a harder requirement than describing what the image depicts. A photograph decorating a page needs no description and should be marked as decorative; a chart carrying data needs the data, not a note that it is a chart; a scanned signature block needs the names. Getting this wrong in either direction degrades the experience — verbose descriptions of ornamental images are as obstructive as missing ones. The reason alt text is usually absent at estate scale is that it cannot be added to content whose images are not individually addressable. Centralpoint's structural conversion during ingestion makes images record elements rather than embedded pixels, so alternative text becomes a property that can be populated, reviewed and reported on. Where it is missing, that is a reportable condition across the estate rather than a defect discovered by a user.