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
67% of ADA Lawsuits Target Small Business. Do You Have an ADA Compliant Website?
Over 5,000 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 alone, a 37 percent increase from the year before. If you think those lawsuits are targeting Fortune 500 companies, think again. Nearly two-thirds of them hit businesses with less than $25 million in annual revenue. If your business has a website and serves the public, you need to know whether that site is an ADA compliant website or a legal liability sitting on the open internet. We work with small businesses every day, and this is one of the conversations we have most often. The good news is that compliance is achievable. Building an ADA compliant website is within reach for any business, and the work it requires makes your site better for every user, including Google. Here is what you need to know. What Web Accessibility Actually Means Web accessibility means building and maintaining a website that anyone can use, regardless of physical, visual, auditory, or cognitive ability. In legal terms, it means operating an ADA compliant website. That includes making sure people who navigate by keyboard, rely on screen readers, or cannot distinguish low-contrast text can access everything your site offers. This is not just an ethics conversation. It is a technical standards conversation. And those standards have a name. The Four POUR Principles Explained The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, organize all accessibility requirements around four core principles. Your site must be: Perceivable — Users must be able to see, hear, or otherwise perceive all content. This includes alt text on images, captions on video, and sufficient color contrast between text and background. Operable — Users must be able to navigate and interact with every element of your site. If someone cannot use a mouse, they should still be able to reach every link, button, and form field using only a keyboard. Understandable — Content and navigation must be predictable and clear. Labels on forms, descriptive error messages, and consistent navigation menus all fall into this bucket. Robust — Your code must be clean enough that assistive technologies like screen readers can interpret it accurately. Broken HTML or poorly structured headings cause real navigation failures for real users. WCAG 2.1 and Why Level AA Is the Standard You Need to Hit WCAG has three levels: A (minimum), AA (standard), and AAA (enhanced). Level AA is the standard referenced in most legal cases and the benchmark the DOJ adopted in its 2024 rule. It requires, among other things, a minimum 4.5:1 color contrast ratio for normal body text. Reaching Level AA is what makes an ADA compliant website legally defensible. Most websites we audit fail this test out of the box. Who the ADA Actually Applies To (Probably You) This is the question we hear most from small business clients, usually followed by “but we only have five employees” or “we don’t have a physical storefront.” Neither of those things exempts you from needing an ADA compliant website. Title III and Public Accommodations Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers businesses that serve the public, which the law calls “places of public accommodation.” This category includes restaurants, retailers, service providers, gyms, hotels, professional offices, and virtually every type of business that interacts with customers. The ADA was written in 1990, before the commercial internet existed, but courts have consistently applied it to websites, which means operating an ADA compliant website is now a baseline legal expectation for most businesses. The DOJ’s Position on Websites The Department of Justice has maintained for years that websites operated by businesses covered under Title III must be accessible. In 2024, the DOJ reinforced this position and issued guidance at ada.gov clarifying that the ADA applies to web content and digital services. The DOJ also finalized a formal rule requiring state and local government websites to comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which has been widely cited as the expected standard for private businesses as well. Does Business Size Matter? For Title III, no. The ADA does not carve out exemptions based on revenue or headcount. Whether you have two employees or two hundred, an ADA compliant website is not optional. What varies is the severity of risk, which we cover next. Why ADA Website Lawsuits Are Surging and Who Is Getting Hit The numbers are not subtle. Over 5,000 lawsuits were filed in 2025 across state and federal courts, and the trajectory is still climbing. The businesses getting hit are rarely the ones that tried to build an ADA compliant website and fell short. They are the ones who never started. The Numbers You Need to Know More than 2,014 federal accessibility lawsuits were filed in just the first half of 2025, a 37 percent year-over-year increase, according to UsableNet’s 2025 Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report. E-commerce websites account for 77 percent of all cases. Average settlement costs range from $5,000 to $20,000 for smaller businesses, but legal fees and remediation costs can push the total well past that. Roughly 45 percent of companies sued in 2025 had already been sued before, which suggests that settling once without fixing the underlying problems puts you right back in the crosshairs. Small Businesses Are the Primary Target In 2024, 67 percent of digital accessibility lawsuits targeted companies with annual revenues under $25 million. In 2025, that number was still 64 percent. Plaintiffs and their attorneys specifically seek out smaller businesses because they are statistically more likely to settle quickly and quietly. Not having an ADA compliant website puts you directly in that pool. According to the CDC, 1 in 4 Americans lives with a disability. That is not a niche market. That is a quarter of your potential customer base. The Widget Trap Here is something most guides do not tell you: buying an accessibility overlay widget does not protect you from a lawsuit. In 2025, 1,416 businesses that had an accessibility widget installed were still sued for accessibility violations, up from 1,023 in 2024. The Federal Trade Commission fined one major overlay