Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Use the words, not images
Using images in place of text content is one of the mistakes I see constantly on websites designed and built by someone who's not that familiar with web design and it's techniques in general. Very often the calls of action are made to look pretty by turning the whole thing, including the text, background and the button, into one image. Testimonials pages tend to be the biggest offenders. Making them look the way the website owner hopes may be a bit over the league of the person who built the page. And then there are the about pages, which the website owner wanted to look really fancy. The problem is that these contents that are supposed to be text, sometimes even long texts, are turned into images and images, pretty as they are, don't quite do it for text content.
I mentioned this before on my article about overusing images. On that one I took on an about page, which was very pretty. To my huge disappointment it was one big image. I'm returning to this subject, because of the image testimonials and calls of action, which seem to be trending on "home made" websites. It may seem like not that big a deal to use images in place of text on your site. However it can turn out to be a big problem for you and for your website visitors.
Additional images slow your website down. Each image, whether it's a content image or a background, social media button or anything else, makes your website slow. I like using images and image backgrounds and I don't say you shouldn't use them at all. When you unnecessarily use images where there could be text you are slowing your website down for no good reason. For instance when you use one big image in the place of your about text or something like that you are making that page considerably slower.
Using images in place of text is accessibility issue. What if for some reason the images won't render? Website images can be disabled on many browsers and some of your website visitors are doing this to save data or to make websites load faster on slow connections. Additionally images may end up not loading for many reasons. But most of all you should consider the visitors who are visually impaired. Firstly your image's text may be too small and zooming in won't help. Secondly many visually impaired people use screen readers which cannot read the text on image. Of course you can always add alternative text (alt attribute) to your images. Actually apparently screen readers ignore images without alt texts, so you should always provide them. Some screen readers don't have problem with long alt texts, but there are those which divide alt text into shorter chuncks and read these chuncks as if they were separate images. This can be confusing. There's always the longdesc attribute, which can include a longer description. Oh and don't forget the mobile users. Your text images are impossible on small screens.
Using images in place of text is SEO issue. Like screen readers, the search bots which crawl your website to see if it has the right keywords to be included in searches cannot "see" images. They can read the alt texts and I don't know if they read longdesc attribute. I wouldn't however trust only these attributes to deliver the all the right keywords to search engines. Also the images slowing down your website are harming your SEO score. Unless you want Google (and other search engines) to miss some really good keywords text content as actual text instead of images could provide, you must stop using images in the place of perfectly good text.
I understand making your site look pretty and flashy with only text and CSS can be really difficult. Thus you must either get help by someone who can do it without using too many images or simplify the whole thing and forget the flashy. Also if your website designer/builder wants to turn some of your text content in images please fire them and hire someone else. I can assure you a website can be pretty AND accessible. Use the words.
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