Sample Alt Text Descriptions
This document provides examples for common types of visual elements that would require
accessible image descriptions, including visual art, photographs, maps, and diagrams.
There are two major types of accessible image descriptions:
• Alt text: a short description (maximum 250 characters, not including spaces) of a visual
element such as an image, chart, or table that is accessed through assistive technology.
All images that are not purely decorative should have alt text.
• Extended description: a detailed description of complex visual elements such as maps or
visual elements that require a text transcription; supplied in addition to alt text.
Visual Art
Example 1
From Jodi Cranston, Animal Sightings: Art, Animals, and European Court Culture, 1400–1550
(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2025).
<caption> Albrecht Dürer, Apollo and Diana, ca. 1503. Engraving. 11.5 ´ 7.2 cm. Gift of Henry
Walters, 1917, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
<alt text> Apollo stands with his bow half-drawn in front of Diana, who is seated with a stag’s
head resting on her lap. (89 characters)
<surrounding text> We know from letters as well as extant artworks, such as the prints made of
Apollo and Diana (figs. 56 and 57), that the two artists were aware of each other (beginning in
1495 in Venice) and each other’s work.
Example 2
Figure in a book focusing on iconography
<caption> Dedication page from Donizo of Canossa’s Vita Mathildis.
<alt text> Matilda of Tuscany enthroned with two figures standing on either side of her. On her
right, a tonsured monk holds an open codex and on her left, a knight holds a sheathed sword.
Matilda holds a flower in one hand and is dressed in rich blue and pink robes trimmed with gold.
(223 characters)
Photographs
Example 3
From Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species
(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023), 139.
<caption> Ray Lammens’s tarped barn. Photo: Marcel O’Gorman.
<alt text> Photograph of the inside of Ray Lammens’s barn showing the industrial tarp installed
to protect the nesting swallows along the roof from the farming equipment below.
<surrounding text> Examining the ceiling, it is clear to see the care by which the tarp was
installed. Pieced together from large industrial tarps that have had rivets punched into all sides
and laced together like a large quilt, the tarp, reminiscent of circus-tent draping, separates the loft
space (which Ray leaves open with a small access door to the outside) from the barn below.
Documentary Materials
Example 4
Figure in a book on publishing history
<caption> First edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).
<alt text> Printed title page of the first volume of Pride and Prejudice containing information
about the author and printer. (97 characters)
<extended description> The title page reads, Pride and Prejudice, a novel in three volumes by the
author of Sense and Sensibility. Volume 1. London. Printed for T. Egerton, Military Library,
Whitehall, 1813. (155 characters)
Maps
Example 5
From Briana L. Wong, Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic
Resilience (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023), 2.
<caption> Trajectory of my research.
<alt text> World map showing the author’s travel to various field sites for research, beginning in
Pennsylvania, with stops in California, France, and Cambodia. (128 characters)
<surrounding text> Based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between June 2018
and June 2019 in the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California;
Paris, France; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia, this book explores questions of religious identity and
the search for meaning within the context of transnational Cambodian evangelicalism,
particularly with respect to conversion, cosmology, spirituality, and mission. (371 characters)
Example 6
From Malka Z. Simkovich, Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity
(University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2024), xiv–xv.
<caption> Map of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, ca. 240 BCE. Map by Simeon Netchev.
<alt text> Map of the eastern Mediterranean Sea outlining the territorial borders of the Ptolemaic
Kingdom, Macedonian Kingdom, and the Seleucid Empire as well as the major cities in each
region. (156 characters)
<extended description> The territory of the Ptolemaic Kingdom includes modern-day Egypt, the
northern coast of Libya, the island of Cyprus, and the coast of Turkey. Territories in modern
Israel and Palestine are marked as having been lost by the Ptolemaic Kingdom before the reign
of Cleopatra VII. The territory of the Macedonian Kingdom is restricted to modern-day Greece,
and the Seleucid Empire includes the southern half of modern-day Turkey and stretches east.
(443 characters)
Diagrams
Example 7
From David Howes, Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology,
Psychology and Law (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023), 119.
<caption> The Four Elements of classical Greek cosmology. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
<alt text> Diagram depicting the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water on points of a
diamond with their corresponding qualities listed along the sides of the diamond between each
element. (155 characters)
<surrounding text> According to classical science—or “the Aristotelian worldview”—the
universe was composed of the Four Elements: fire, air, earth, and water. Each element was
distinguished by a different combination of tactile qualities: hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, the
element of earth was categorized—or qualified—as cold and dry, fire as hot and dry, water as
cold and wet, and air as hot and wet.
Example 8
From Stephen W. Angell, Pink Dandelion, and David Harrington Watt, The Creation of Modern
Quaker Diversity, 1830–1937 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023), 5.
<caption> The Evolution of American Quakerism, 1800–1907. From Thomas D. Hamm, The
Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), 176. © Indiana University Press.
<alt text> A diagram depicting the branching and converging lines of American Quaker groups
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. (109 characters)
<extended description> The overall group “American Quakerism” splits into two groups: the
Orthodox and the Hicksites. The Orthodox group then splits into two groups: the Wilburites and
the Gurneyites. The Gurneyites split into three groups: the Conservatives, who recombined with
the Wilburites, the Renewal, and the Holiness. The Renewal would evolve into the Moderates
and finally the Modernists. (320 characters)
<surrounding text> The 1830–1937 period saw the end of a single Quaker tradition and its
subsequent splintering into multiple schismatic tendencies—a splintering that occurs when
counterbalancing emphases are separated from one another. As Carole Spencer’s chapter in this
volume attests, wholly new variants of the Quaker faith emerged during this period, with a
pattern of four main groupings taking shape by the end of the nineteenth century: revival
evangelical, renewal evangelical, conservative, and modernist.
[The introduction also includes information on the specific beliefs of the individual branches of
Quakerism.]
