A screen reader hits a picture and has two options: read a sentence describing what’s in it, or read the file name instead — “image, IMG, 4471, JPEG” — and move on. Alt text is that sentence: a short, written description of what an image shows, spoken aloud so someone who can’t see the picture still knows what’s there.

Why it matters

Look at a product photo and you know what you’re about to buy. Take the picture away and leave only a file name, and you know nothing — not the color, not the shape, not whether it’s even the right product. That’s the whole transaction a screen reader user gets when alt text is missing. The same blank hits a seasonal sale banner, a chart of pricing tiers, a photo of a floor plan: real information a sighted visitor gets for free, and a screen reader user doesn’t get at all.

What it looks like

That’s not hypothetical. A 2023 lawsuit against Hasbro’s toy site, Hasbropulse.com, put it in the plaintiff’s own words: “There are many important pictures on Hasbropulse.com that lack a text equivalent… Plaintiff and blind Hasbropulse.com customers are unable to determine what is on the website, browse the website or investigate and/or make purchases.” Luis Toro, the plaintiff, is legally blind and reads by screen reader. He alleged the same site trapped keyboard users too — buttons a mouse could click but a keyboard couldn’t reach.

We’ve found the same gap ourselves, on a different kind of site entirely. Scanning 12 real-estate brokerage sites for a separate project, our tool flagged missing alt text on IDX/MLS logo images and tracking pixels on 4 of the 12 — 11 pages in total. None of those images had any alt attribute at all, meaningful or empty.

How it’s fixed

Give every meaningful image a short, specific description of what it actually shows: “Gold wire-frame sunglasses, front view,” never “image1.jpg,” never the file name at all. Give a purely decorative image — a background texture, a spacer — an empty alt attribute (alt="") instead, so a screen reader skips it on purpose rather than reading out clutter. The rule of thumb: if the image carries information, describe it; if it doesn’t, mark it silent. Either way, a person has to look at the page and decide — a script can’t do that at scale, which is why automated overlays can’t fix it either.

Want to know if your own site has this gap? Run it through our free report — no login, no credit card, no sales call.

The fine print

  • The Hasbro case was never decided on the merits. Toro v. Hasbro, Inc. settled two months after filing, with no ruling on whether the alt-text allegation — or any other — was true. A settlement resolves a claim; it doesn’t adjudicate one, as we’ve written elsewhere. What’s cited here is the complaint’s language, not a court finding.
  • Our brokerage figure is a floor, from a small, purposive sample. 12 sites, chosen because a template vendor features them in its own showcase — not a random sample of real estate sites generally, and not a claim about how common this is industry-wide. Automated scanning also can’t judge whether alt text that exists is actually accurate; it only catches images missing it outright.
  • WCAG 2.1 covers this under Success Criterion 1.1.1, Non-Text Content — the standard courts reference in ADA website cases, not one any court has adopted as binding law.
  • We’re not lawyers, and this isn’t legal advice.

Sources