Upload an image to a WordPress post and the media library asks for alt text right there in the sidebar, in a small field that’s easy to skip past on the way to hitting publish. Skip it enough times and nothing visibly breaks, the image still displays, the layout still looks right, the post still goes live. That’s exactly why alt text is one of the most consistently neglected fields in WordPress: the cost of skipping it is invisible to the person publishing and entirely real for someone who can’t see the image at all.
It’s a small enough detail that it’s easy to dismiss as a checkbox exercise, but it’s worth treating with more seriousness than that, both because of who actually depends on it and because of what happens when a site’s accessibility gaps eventually get noticed by someone other than a screen reader user browsing casually.
What alt text actually does
Alt text, short for “alternative text”, is a written description attached to an image’s HTML markup, read aloud by screen readers when a blind or low-vision visitor’s assistive technology encounters that image. It’s also what displays if an image fails to load, and it’s one of the signals search engines use to understand what an image depicts, since crawlers can’t visually interpret pixels the way a person can. Three genuinely different audiences depend on the same short string of text: a person using a screen reader, a person on a broken connection where images time out, and a search engine crawler indexing the page.
Good alt text describes what’s actually relevant about the image in context, not everything visible in the frame, and not a generic label that could apply to a thousand other photos. “A golden retriever sitting on wet sand at sunset, with a tennis ball in the foreground” tells a screen reader user something specific; “dog” or “image123.jpg” tells them almost nothing.
A short, accurate history worth knowing
Alt text isn’t a modern accessibility trend, it’s been part of the HTML specification since the img tag itself was standardized in HTML 2.0 in 1995, originally intended for text-only browsers and slow connections where images might not load at all. Its accessibility role became formalized with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), first published in 1999 by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. WCAG’s “text alternatives” principle, that every piece of non-text content needs a text equivalent serving the same purpose, has stayed essentially unchanged through WCAG 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2, even as the rest of the guidelines have expanded substantially to cover mobile, cognitive accessibility, and more.
What’s changed since the 1990s is the legal and practical weight behind it. A meaningful share of accessibility lawsuits and demand letters under the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States, and equivalent legislation in the EU (the European Accessibility Act) and elsewhere, cite missing or inadequate alt text as a specific, easily documented violation, it’s one of the simplest things for an automated accessibility scanner or a plaintiff’s expert to point at, which makes it one of the more common findings in real accessibility audits and complaints, not a theoretical risk.
Why it matters beyond compliance
Real people, not an abstract requirement
Visual impairment affects a meaningful share of any large audience, permanent blindness or low vision, yes, but also temporary situations (an eye infection, post-surgery recovery) and situational ones (bright sunlight glaring off a phone screen, a low-quality connection where images render slowly or not at all). Alt text serves all of those cases identically, which is part of why it’s worth treating as a baseline practice rather than a niche accommodation for a small population.
A genuine, if secondary, SEO signal
Search engines can’t see an image the way a person can, so alt text is one of the limited signals available for understanding what an image depicts and how it relates to the surrounding content. It contributes to image search rankings specifically, and Google Images drives a non-trivial share of traffic for certain content categories, recipe blogs, product photography, tutorial content with screenshots. That said, alt text’s SEO value is a byproduct of writing it accurately and descriptively for the humans and assistive technology it’s actually meant for, treating it as a keyword-stuffing opportunity produces worse alt text and, ironically, weaker SEO value than writing it honestly, since search engines are reasonably good at detecting and discounting unnatural keyword density in alt attributes.
How to actually write it well
Be specific, not exhaustive
Alt text should describe what’s relevant to the content, not catalog every visible detail. A product photo on an e-commerce page needs the details that matter for a purchase decision, color, distinguishing features, not a description of the studio lighting setup behind it. Over-describing wastes the listener’s time exactly as much as under-describing fails to inform them.
Skip “image of” and “picture of”
Screen readers already announce that an image is present before reading its alt text, so prefacing the description with “image of” or “picture of” is redundant, adding words without adding information. Jump straight into the description itself.
Match the description to the image’s actual role in the content
The same photograph needs different alt text depending on why it’s on the page. A photo of the Golden Gate Bridge on a general travel blog might warrant “Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise, framed by fog rolling in from the bay.” The same photo used specifically to illustrate a point about a particular engineering detail should describe that detail instead, since the image’s purpose on that page is different from its purpose as generic travel imagery.
Write for function, not just appearance, on interactive elements
Icons and images that function as buttons or links, a search magnifying-glass icon, a social media logo linking out to a profile, need alt text describing what happens when the element is activated, not a literal visual description. “Search” for a magnifying-glass search trigger; “Follow us on Instagram” for a linked Instagram logo, not “magnifying glass icon” or “camera-shaped logo.”
Purely decorative images need an empty alt attribute, not a missing one
This is a detail that trips up a lot of people trying to do the right thing: an image that’s purely decorative, a background flourish carrying no informational content, should have alt="", an explicitly empty attribute, which tells screen readers to skip announcing it entirely. Leaving the alt attribute out altogether, rather than setting it empty, can cause some screen readers to read the image filename aloud instead, which is a worse experience than silence. WordPress’s media library doesn’t always make this distinction obvious, so it’s worth deliberately setting decorative images to empty alt text rather than just leaving the field blank and hoping.
Alt text in practice on a WordPress site
WordPress prompts for alt text in the media library’s attachment details panel, and it’s worth building the habit of filling it in at upload time rather than after the fact, since a backlog of hundreds of images missing alt text is a genuinely tedious retroactive cleanup project compared to the few extra seconds it takes per image during upload. For sites with a large existing media library and no consistent alt text history, a bulk accessibility audit plugin, Accessibility Checker or WP Accessibility are both reasonable starting points, can surface every image missing alt text across the site, which turns an overwhelming, undefined problem into a specific, trackable list.
Featured images deserve particular attention, since they’re frequently the largest, most prominent image on a page and the one most likely to appear in social shares and search results, getting the alt text right there has outsized value relative to a small inline image buried in body content. It’s also worth checking that any theme-generated decorative images (background patterns, dividers baked into a theme’s design) are correctly marked with empty alt attributes at the theme level rather than left to individual content editors to catch, since that’s a fix the theme’s developer needs to make once rather than something every content author has to remember to work around individually.
Beyond alt text: the rest of image accessibility
Alt text is the most visible piece of image accessibility, but it’s one piece of a larger picture. Complex images, charts, infographics, diagrams with genuine informational content that can’t be summarized in a single short alt attribute, need a longer-form text description nearby in the page content, since alt text alone isn’t sufficient for information-dense visuals. Color shouldn’t be the only way information is conveyed in an image (a chart distinguishing categories by color alone excludes colorblind users, roughly 1 in 12 men and a much smaller share of women, unless patterns or labels back up the color coding). And any video content needs captions and, ideally, a transcript, since alt text has no equivalent mechanism for moving images.
Where alt text sits in WCAG, specifically
It’s worth knowing the exact rule this maps to, since “accessibility” as a general term can feel vague while the actual requirement is specific and testable. Alt text requirements fall under WCAG Success Criterion 1.1.1, “Non-text Content,” which requires that all non-text content presented to the user has a text alternative serving an equivalent purpose, this single criterion covers alt text on images, but also transcripts for audio, and text alternatives for CAPTCHAs and other non-text interactive controls. It’s a Level A criterion, the baseline tier in WCAG’s three-tier system (A, AA, AAA), which means it’s considered a fundamental requirement rather than an advanced enhancement, most legal accessibility standards, including Section 508 in the US and the EN 301 549 standard referenced by the European Accessibility Act, require at minimum WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance, which necessarily includes this Level A criterion as a floor.
Knowing the specific criterion number matters practically because it’s what shows up in real accessibility audit reports and legal complaints, a demand letter or an automated scan report citing “1.1.1 failures” is referring to exactly this, and understanding the underlying requirement makes those reports far less intimidating to act on than treating them as an opaque legal problem.
Real-world stakes: this isn’t a hypothetical legal risk
Web accessibility litigation under the ADA has grown into a genuinely significant category of legal exposure for businesses with any online storefront or service, and missing alt text is one of the most commonly cited, easily documented violations in these cases specifically because it’s trivial for a plaintiff’s expert or an automated scanning tool to prove, either the alt attribute exists with meaningful content, or it doesn’t. The Domino’s Pizza case is probably the most widely cited example in this space: after years of litigation over whether the ADA applies to websites and apps at all, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Domino’s appeal in 2019, letting a Ninth Circuit ruling stand that affirmed the ADA does apply to a business’s website and mobile app when they’re tied to a physical place of business. That outcome didn’t create the underlying requirement, WCAG and Section 508 existed well before, but it removed a major legal argument that businesses had been using to avoid taking web accessibility seriously, and demand letters citing basic, easily fixed issues like missing alt text increased substantially in the years following.
None of this is meant to induce panic over a single missing alt attribute, the practical risk scales with the number and severity of accessibility gaps on a site, and a business making a genuine, documented effort is in a very different position than one that’s never addressed accessibility at all. But it’s worth knowing that alt text sits at the intersection of “genuinely helps real users” and “reduces genuine legal exposure,” which is a stronger case for prioritizing it than either argument alone.
AI-generated alt text: useful starting point, not a substitute for review
Several WordPress tools now offer AI-generated alt text suggestions at upload time, Jetpack includes this as a built-in feature, and a handful of dedicated accessibility plugins offer similar automated description generation using image-recognition models. These tools are a genuinely useful starting point, especially for a large media library backlog that would otherwise never get manually reviewed at all, an imperfect AI-generated description is better than no description or a generic filename read aloud by a screen reader. What they’re not yet reliable at is understanding an image’s specific contextual purpose on a given page, an AI captioning tool can usually identify “a person standing near a car” accurately but has no way to know whether that image is illustrating a car accident lawyer’s case results page or a used-car marketplace listing, two contexts that call for very different alt text emphasis. Treat AI-generated alt text as a draft to review and refine for genuinely important images, a hero image, a product photo, anything central to the page’s purpose, rather than a fully automated, hands-off solution.
Testing your own alt text quickly
It’s worth actually experiencing a page the way a screen reader user would at least once, since it reframes the whole exercise from an abstract compliance checkbox into something concrete. On a Mac, VoiceOver ships built into macOS (Cmd+F5 to toggle it on) and can be pointed at any webpage; on Windows, NVDA is a free, widely used screen reader that works the same way. Turning either one on and tabbing through a page’s images, or using the screen reader’s dedicated “list all images” navigation shortcut, which both VoiceOver and NVDA support, surfaces missing or unhelpful alt text immediately and viscerally in a way that reading a code audit report never quite does. It’s a fifteen-minute exercise worth doing on your own site at least once, specifically because it makes every future alt text decision feel less like satisfying a rule and more like writing for an actual person on the other end.
Making it a genuine habit rather than a one-time audit
The sites that handle this well treat alt text as a normal part of the publishing checklist, not a separate accessibility initiative bolted on after the fact, the same way spell-checking or verifying links work before hitting publish. For a team publishing regularly, that means training everyone who uploads images, not just designating one person as the accessibility owner who reviews everything after publication. A five-second habit at upload time scales far better across a growing site than a periodic audit trying to catch up on months of accumulated gaps, and it means every new piece of content is accessible from the moment it goes live rather than accessible eventually, once someone gets around to fixing it.
None of this is complicated in isolation, a sentence or two of accurate description, an empty attribute for decorative images, a moment’s thought about what actually matters in the frame. What it requires is consistency, applied to every image, not just the ones on pages someone happens to be reviewing closely. That consistency is the actual accessibility work, more than any individual well-crafted description.
Start with whatever’s easiest to act on today: run a screen reader across your homepage for fifteen minutes, or install an accessibility checker plugin and see how many images in your media library are missing alt text entirely. Either one turns an abstract “we should be more accessible” intention into a concrete, prioritized list, and a concrete list, however long, is always more actionable than a vague sense that something ought to be improved eventually.