AbleFix

A Shopify merchant's guide to image alt text

Last updated: July 2026.

Missing or unhelpful image alt text is the single most common accessibility failure on e-commerce storefronts — and one of the easiest to fix once you know what to look for. Here's what it is, why it matters, and how to do it well across a whole catalog.

What alt text actually does

Alt text (the alt attribute on an <img> tag) is a short text description of an image. Screen reader software reads it aloud to visitors who can't see the image itself. It also displays if the image fails to load, and search engines use it to understand what a product image shows. One attribute, three audiences: accessibility, resilience, and SEO.

The most common mistakes

  • Missing entirely. A screen reader either skips the image silently or, worse, reads out the raw filename.
  • Filename dumps. Alt text like IMG_4821.jpg or product-photo-final-v2.png — technically present, functionally useless.
  • Generic filler. "Image of product" or "photo" on every single image tells a screen reader user nothing they didn't already know.
  • Keyword stuffing. Cramming search terms into alt text for SEO makes it worse for the people it's actually meant for, and search engines penalize the pattern anyway.

How to write it well

Good alt text is short, specific, and describes what's actually relevant about the image in context. For a product photo, that usually means the product name and a distinguishing detail — color, material, or variant — rather than a full scene description. "Navy blue canvas tote bag with leather handles" is useful; "bag" is not. Purely decorative images (spacers, background flourishes) should have empty alt text (alt="") so screen readers skip them entirely, rather than reading out irrelevant descriptions.

Doing this across a whole catalog

Writing good alt text for one product page is easy. Doing it consistently across a catalog of hundreds of product images, and keeping it up to date as new products get added, is where most stores fall behind. AbleFix's bulk alt-text tool scans your product images, flags the missing and junk ones using the same pattern-matching described above, and suggests alt text deterministically from your product title, type, and variant data — no AI guesswork, and you review and approve every suggestion before it's written back to your store via Shopify's own API. Pro plans can also auto-sync new products as they're added, so the catalog doesn't quietly drift out of date again.