Alt attribute presence

What this check looks for

This check inspects every <img> on the page (excluding ones inside <noscript>) and finds any missing an alt attribute entirely, skipping images explicitly marked decorative — role="presentation", aria-hidden="true", or an intentionally empty alt="". If any non-decorative image lacks alt entirely, it fails, listing each offender. A page with no images reports "na"; a page where every image has an alt attribute passes (text quality is graded separately).

Why it matters

Alt text is how a screen reader describes an image to someone who can't see it, and how search engines understand what an image depicts since they can't reliably interpret pixels the way a person does — without it, both simply skip the image's meaning entirely. It also directly powers Google Images and any visual-search feature that might otherwise surface your product or content. AI answer engines that process a page's images as part of understanding it lean on alt text as the ground-truth caption; an image with no alt is effectively invisible content to a model that can't run its own vision pass on every page it crawls.

How to fix it

Add a descriptive alt attribute to every meaningful image, and an explicit empty alt to genuinely decorative ones:

<!-- Content image: needs a real description -->
<img src="/headphones-hero.jpg" alt="Acme wireless headphones in matte black, folded on a wooden desk">

<!-- Purely decorative: explicit empty alt -->
<img src="/divider.svg" alt="" role="presentation">

Never leave the attribute off entirely — even an empty alt="" communicates intent, while a missing attribute leaves assistive tech and crawlers guessing.