What is Alt Text? (alternative text)
Alt text is a short description that allows readers who cannot see an image to understand the information it provides. It makes your work accessible to a wider audience and helps search engines understand and index images so that your research can be more easily found.
Springer Nature is providing AI-suggested alt text in accepted manuscripts for journal articles, which is being introduced via a staged rollout from September to mid-November. The tool generates draft alt text for the figures and images included in proofs, and authors are required to review, correct, and approve this text during proofing. Once a journal has been onboarded to include alt text, all images in all articles published after its inclusion will be required to have alt text.
Why?
Springer Nature is committed to making our content, platforms, and services as accessible as possible for the global research community. We want to ensure that researchers, students, and readers with a wide range of access needs can understand and use your research.
How?
As part of this commitment, we are providing a generative AI tool that suggests alt text for the figures and images included in your manuscript. AI-generated alt text may not appear for each image if they do not meet the Open AI sensitive image policy. These images will still require manual descriptions.
Authors are responsible for carefully reviewing alt text during the proofing stage and making any changes if the alt text is inaccurate. As the author, you are best able to confirm whether the description accurately reflects the image and its role in the surrounding content.
What you need to do, as an author:
- Review the suggested alt text
- Make any changes if the alt text is inaccurate
- Confirm and submit your changes
To find out how to assess the quality of the suggested alt text, read the guide on ‘How to write good alt text’.
Please see Accessibility requirements for figures, images, and supplementary materials.
Historical publications
At this stage, we will not require alt text to be included in articles published ahead of journals’ inclusion in the alt text program.
This means that if your article enters the proofing tool without any alt text, you will not be required to add it – although we would still encourage you to do so, as it will help make your article more accessible.