Alt text on Pinterest: what the field does, and what it doesn't

Someone loads the holiday board on a Tuesday afternoon. Thirty product images, thirty titles, thirty descriptions written carefully for the algorithm — and thirty images that say nothing at all to a person using a screen reader. The alt text box was two clicks away the whole time, sitting behind a dropdown almost nobody opens.

Here's the short version of what that box is. Pinterest gives standard image Pins and video Pins an alt text field of up to 500 characters, tucked under More options in the Pin builder, and Pinterest's help page says the description you put there is read only to people using a screen reader. That one sentence resolves most of the confusion about the field. It is not a second description, it does not display under your Pin, and it is not where your discoverability comes from.

Two fields, two different jobs

The description is the discovery field. Pinterest's Pin specs allow up to 800 characters there, note that descriptions don't appear when you view a Pin in the home feed or the search feed, and state that the algorithm uses them to judge relevance for delivery. That is the box your keywords belong in.

The alt text field is the accessibility field. Same Pin, different reader, different job — the split we walk through in alt text, captions, and descriptions. Pasting your keyword-loaded description into the alt box means one blind pinner hears your search copy read aloud and no one else gains anything.

Where the field hides — and how to fix an old Pin

On a new Pin: upload the image, fill in the title and description, then scroll down and open the More options dropdown. The alt text box is inside it, capped at 500 characters. Publish as normal.

On a Pin you already published, open it from your board, click the ellipsis above it, choose Edit Pin, open More options, and write the description there. Not every platform lets you go back, so this is worth knowing. Pinterest is a search surface as much as a feed, which means a Pin from two years ago can still be turning up for people — a back-catalog pass pays off here in a way it doesn't on a chronological timeline.

Most Pins are, in effect, pictures of text

This is what makes Pinterest different from a photo feed. Pinterest's own builder ships with an Add text layer tool, and the format rewards using it: recipe cards, numbered list graphics, price overlays, labeled before-and-afters. The words a pinner is scanning for are baked into the picture, which means they are not text and nothing can read them.

W3C's guidance on images of text is blunt about the fix: where an image of text has to be used, the text alternative must carry the same words the image shows. So the overlay headline goes into your image description word for word, and then you describe the rest. It's the same discipline as writing for text-heavy graphics anywhere else — you just hit it on nearly every Pin.

Five hundred characters is a roomy field, but a ceiling isn't a target. Front-load the sentence that matters and stop when you've said it; the instinct behind the 125-character rule holds even where the box is bigger.

If you're pinning products

A lot of what gets pinned is something a person is thinking about buying. Material, color, shape, scale, and what the thing is actually for are what a shopper needs from an image, and that's exactly what alt text for product photos should carry. Skip "image of," skip the word "Pin," and don't retype the title sitting directly above it — the screen reader already read that part out.