Alt Text

Understanding Alt Text

Alt text serves two audiences at once: accessibility tools and search engines. Screen readers announce the alt text in place of the image, so a shopper using assistive technology can still understand what the page is communicating. Search engines use alt text as an input signal for image search and for understanding the context of the page overall.

Effective alt text is descriptive, specific, and contextual. "Black leather sneakers with white sole, side view" is useful; "shoe" is not; and "best comfortable black leather sneakers buy now" is spammy and often demoted. The rule of thumb is to describe the image as you would to someone who cannot see it, including the product and any relevant visual detail, while avoiding keyword stuffing.

Decorative images — purely visual flourishes that add no informational value — should use an empty alt attribute (`alt=""`) rather than be omitted entirely. An empty alt tells screen readers to skip the image, which is the right behavior for decoration. Omitting the attribute entirely causes some screen readers to read the filename, which is almost always worse.

Shopify themes expose alt text on the product-image object, and most stores default to the image filename or product title. That default is adequate for the primary product image but wastes opportunities on secondary shots, lifestyle images, and variant photography. A store with dozens of products can meaningfully improve image-search traffic by filling in differentiated alt text on every image, not just the first one.