Alt Text Length Checker

You write an alt attribute and immediately second guess it. Too much detail? Too little? The 125 character guideline has circulated for years and comes from something practical: older screen readers truncated long strings, and nobody wants a paragraph read aloud just to learn that the photo shows the team. Counting characters by hand across twenty images, though, is a job nobody actually does.

The count is straightforward: the text is measured and lands in one of three bands. Empty gets a flag, because a missing alt and an empty alt are not the same thing (alt="" is the correct way to say an image is decorative and should be skipped by the screen reader). Under 10 characters raises a thin description warning, and over 125 raises the long text one. Length is measured in UTF-16 units, so an emoji counts as two.

Length is not quality. Photo of the event runs 18 characters, sails through the count and says nothing useful. The better question: if the image failed to load, what sentence would keep the page making sense? Do not repeat a caption that already sits beside the image, and skip openers like image of. For charts, the alt becomes a short label while the real description belongs in the surrounding text. The counting runs in your browser.