What is alt text, and why do so many business websites leave it out?

What is alt text for images?

A picture on a web page sits in the code as a tag, and that tag has a slot for a line of text describing the picture. The line is called alt text, short for alternative text. Most visitors never see it. It shows up only when a picture fails to load, in the empty box where the picture should have been.

Two kinds of visitor rely on it. A blind or low-vision customer using a screen reader hears the alt text in place of the picture, and when there is none they may hear nothing, or a file name like IMG_4471.jpg. Search engines cannot look at a photo the way a person does, so the alt text is most of what they have to tell them what it shows.

How often it is missing

467 business websites we found advertising on Google, scanned in October 2026. These are sites their owners pay to send customers to, and 105 of them had images with no alt text. That is 22%, and nothing else we looked for turned up more often.

Some groups were worse than the average:

• Clinics: 31% (20 sites), the highest of any group.
• Professional services: 25% (14 sites).
• Trades and home services: 23% (25 sites).

The clinic figure is the one we would least want to see. A clinic is a likely place for someone with poor eyesight to be trying to book an appointment, and they may well be using a screen reader to do it. The full breakdown, trade by trade, is in what we found in 467 business websites.

Does alt text help SEO?

Yes, in a modest way. A search engine reads the alt text as the words that go with a picture, which is how a photo of your work can turn up when someone searches for images. It will not lift a weak page to the top on its own.

It matters most to a business that sells with photographs, such as a renovator with a gallery of finished jobs or a clinic showing its treatment rooms. Without alt text, those pictures say nothing to a search engine, however good they look.

The temptation is to fill the alt text with search terms. Resist it. A screen reader user hears every one of them read out in a row, and a list of keywords does not describe the picture to anyone. Alt text sits with the other quiet things that decide whether software can read your site at all, like the file covered in does your website block AI crawlers.

Alt text examples

An invented example, not a real job: say the photo is of a kitchen with grey cabinets that you finished. Here are three ways the alt text could go.

• None at all. The screen reader may announce an image and nothing more, or read out the file name.
• alt="kitchen renovation kitchen cabinets best kitchen contractor". A string of search terms. Read aloud, it sounds like spam, and it still does not say what is in the picture.
• alt="Kitchen with grey shaker cabinets, a white counter and brass handles". What you would say if someone on the phone asked you what the photo shows.

The same thinking works for any business. A photo of a treatment room might read alt="Treatment room with a padded table by a window". Your logo is simpler: its alt text is your business name.

Alt text best practices

Keep it to one sentence, and describe what a customer would care about in the picture. You can leave out “a picture of”, because the screen reader already says it is an image. Write it for a person first. If the words a customer would use happen to match what people search for, good, but that is a side effect.

A picture that is pure decoration, a background texture or a divider line, gets an empty alt text, written alt="". That tells the screen reader to skip it. Leaving the alt text out altogether is different, because then the screen reader has nothing to go on and has to guess.

Text inside a picture needs the most care. If a photo carries your phone number or opening hours as part of the image, the alt text has to say them, or a screen reader user never hears them.

Checking your own site

If your site was made on a website builder, open the settings for any picture and look for a field called alt text or image description. If it is empty, that picture has none.

If someone else built the site, you can still look. In Chrome, right-click a photo and choose Inspect. A panel opens with one line of code highlighted; if it contains alt= followed by words, the picture has alt text. Or ask whoever looks after the site for a list of the pictures that have none. On a site with a few dozen photos, writing the missing ones is usually an afternoon’s work.

Website accessibility in Canada

Alt text is one part of making a website usable by everybody who visits it. Text needs enough contrast against its background to be read. The page has to work for someone using a keyboard instead of a mouse, and a proper main heading tells a screen reader where the page starts.

People also ask what the law requires of a website in Canada. We are web designers, not lawyers, and the answer can depend on your province and your business, so we will not guess at it here. If it matters to you, put the question to a lawyer. The work above is worth doing either way, because it is how some of your customers find out what your page says.

Alt text on a Droom website

A Droom build does not pass its own checks while any picture on any page is missing alt text, and the same checks hold body text to a readable contrast. A website is $999 one time for up to five pages, and here is what a Droom website includes.

If you would rather know what your current site is missing first, the free Field Test checks it the way a customer uses it and comes back with a fixed price to fix what fails.