Alt Text for Images: The Ultimate Easy 5-Step Guide for Websites
85 percent of websites have at least one image missing alt text for images. That single oversight is the number one accessibility violation cited in ADA lawsuits, with average settlement costs running between $25,000 and $75,000. If you have images on your website and have never checked your alt text for images, you need to read this before you do anything else today. We audit websites for a living, and this is the most common issue we find across every industry, every platform, and every business size. The good news is that alt text for images is one of the fastest, cheapest fixes in all of web accessibility. The bad news is that most business owners do not know what good alt text looks like, what to skip, or how to find what is already broken. This guide covers all of it. What Alt Text for Images Actually Is Alt text, short for alternative text, is a written description added to an image in your website’s HTML code. When someone using a screen reader visits your website, they hear the alt text read aloud instead of seeing the image. When a search engine crawls your site, it reads the alt text to understand what the image shows. When an image fails to load due to a slow connection or a broken link, the alt text appears in its place. It is one attribute in your HTML that does three jobs at once: accessibility compliance, SEO, and load-state fallback. No other single line of code on your website earns its keep more. Where Alt Text for Images Lives in Your Code If you look at the HTML behind any image on a website, it looks like this: <img src=”website-audit.jpg” alt=”A laptop displaying a website accessibility audit report”> Everything inside the quotes after alt= is your alt text for images. On most website platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, and Wix, you never need to touch the HTML directly. There is a built-in field that handles it for you. We cover those platform-specific steps below. Why Alt Text for Images Is a Legal Requirement WCAG 1.1.1 is the guideline that governs alt text for images. It sits at Level A, the most basic tier of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That means this is not an advanced or optional accessibility feature. It is the floor. Courts have consistently upheld that websites must meet WCAG Level A at a minimum to avoid ADA liability under Title III. The DOJ reinforced this in 2024 with formal guidance published at ada.gov. The European Union’s European Accessibility Act, which took effect June 28, 2025, adds international pressure with penalties up to 100,000 euros or 4 percent of annual revenue for non-compliance. For any business with international website traffic, alt text for images is now a global legal requirement. Alt Text for Images and ADA Lawsuits Missing alt text for images is not a theoretical legal risk. It is the most frequently cited specific violation in ADA website lawsuits. In 2024, 4,605 ADA website lawsuits were filed in the United States, and a significant portion named missing or inadequate alt text as a primary complaint. Settlement costs for smaller businesses average $25,000 to $75,000 before remediation costs and legal fees. The math is simple. Fixing your alt text for images costs nothing but time. Ignoring it could cost tens of thousands of dollars. For more context on how ADA lawsuits work and who is being targeted, read our complete guide to ADA Compliance. What Good Alt Text for Images Looks Like Writing alt text for images is a skill, not a formula. The goal is to describe what the image shows and, when relevant, what it communicates, in a way that gives a screen reader user the same understanding a sighted user would have. Here is a color-coded comparison of common image scenarios, what bad alt text looks like, and what good alt text for images looks like. Red cells are what to avoid. Green cells are what to write. Image Type Bad Alt Text Good Alt Text Product photo (red sneaker) image1.jpg Red leather sneaker with white rubber sole, available in sizes 6 to 13 Team headshot photo Sarah Johnson, Lead Web Designer at Iron & Ember Studios, smiling in a professional headshot Infographic with statistics infographic Infographic showing 85 percent of websites have missing alt text for images, the number one ADA violation Clickable button image button Get your free website accessibility audit Decorative background pattern blue wave pattern (empty — use alt=””) Logo in header logo Iron & Ember Studios logo Chart or graph chart Bar chart showing ADA lawsuits increased 37 percent from 2024 to 2025 Icon next to labeled text icon (empty — use alt=”” when the label is already visible in text) How Long Should Alt Text for Images Be? Keep alt text for images under 125 characters. Screen readers may cut off longer descriptions, and brevity forces you to focus on what actually matters. Do not start with “image of” or “picture of.” Screen readers already announce that an image is present, so opening with those words wastes the listener’s time. Test your contrast at the same time using the WebAIM Contrast Checker to make sure your images are meeting all visual requirements together. Do not keyword-stuff alt text for images. Descriptions like “red sneakers buy red sneakers online best red sneaker deals” are not alt text. They are spam, and Google will treat them that way, hurting your image SEO rather than helping it. Decorative Images: When to Skip Alt Text Entirely Decorative images, meaning images that add visual interest but carry no informational content, should have empty alt attributes written as alt=””. This is critically different from missing alt text. An image with no alt attribute at all is an accessibility violation. An image with alt=”” is a deliberate, correct choice that tells screen readers to skip the image entirely without interrupting the user’s experience. The test: if you removed the image and the