Image "alt attributes" serve two practical purposes:
It makes your website more accessible, including for people with disabilities, helping to describe what each image depicts (read more).
It's also used as a search engine ranking factor that improves SEO (Google recommends it here.)
Best practice: Write a short, simple sentence about what the image is showing.
Here are bad and good examples from Google's recommendations:
Typically, you'd have to painstakingly add alt text to each image manually inside your CMS.
But Wordable makes this easy to do in our Document Details section.
First, you'll need to make sure that "Set Image Attributes" is enabled inside your Export Settings. (This is enabled by default, so it should be on unless you or a team member has disabled it for some reason.)
Next, go into your Document Details by clicking on that document title in your Dashboard:
Here, you should notice the document you clicked is highlighted, and both the filename and alt text is editable for each image:
If you don't see any images showing up, make sure:
There are actually images in this document (don't laugh, I've made this mistake lots!)
That the images in your Google Doc aren't HUGE! (We can pull in pretty big image files, but if they're too big the system won't like it.)
You should also notice that we pull in at least a line of text before and after each image. This way, you or the person responsible for optimizing content has some additional context as to what the image is supposed to be describing.
Pro tip: Batch your optimizations! Just like you shouldn't check emails as they come in, it's often easier and faster to quickly write a ton of file names and alt text at one time for multiple articles before pushing them all live.