Alt Text Checker

Paste your page URL into the Page URL field, set the decorative toggle, and hit Check alt text. The tool fetches the page, parses every <img> element, and returns each image with its alt classification: missing, decorative, good, or suspicious. You also get a coverage percentage (good plus decorative divided by total images) and a CSV export. Manually, you can right-click an image, choose Inspect, and read the alt attribute in the HTML pane, but that approach takes 30 seconds per image and misses lazy-loaded images that load below the fold. This checker scans all images in one pass, including those inside <picture> and <figure> tags. For sites with hundreds of images per page, the time saving is real. Use the website-metadata-checker afterward to confirm meta tags match your image audit.

Yes, alt text is visible in the page source even though it does not display on screen for sighted users under normal conditions. Browsers show alt text in three situations: when an image fails to load (broken link, blocked CDN), when a user hovers in some older browsers, and when a screen reader user navigates the page. Developers see alt text in DevTools by inspecting the <img> element. Search engine crawlers read it directly from the HTML. To audit alt text at scale, paste the URL into this checker and you get every alt value on the page in one view, plus a thumbnail of each image so you can spot mismatches between what the image shows and what the alt says. For a single image, right-click and choose Inspect, then read the alt= attribute on the <img> tag.

Alt text primarily serves people with vision disabilities who use screen readers, including users who are blind, have low vision, or have conditions like macular degeneration that make image content unreadable. Screen readers like NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver read the alt attribute aloud when they encounter an image. Without alt text, the screen reader either skips the image entirely or reads the filename, which is usually meaningless. Alt text also helps users with cognitive disabilities by adding text context to visual content, and users on slow connections who load pages without images. WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.1.1 (Level A) requires text alternatives for all non-decorative images, making alt text a baseline accessibility requirement worldwide. The 2024 WebAIM Million report found that 54% of home pages had missing alt text on at least one image, the most common WCAG failure across the top 1 million sites.

Right-click the image on the webpage and select Inspect (or Inspect Element in some browsers). In the HTML pane that appears, look for the alt attribute within the image tag (<img>). The alt value sits between quotes, for example alt="Black leather Chelsea boot, side profile". If the attribute is absent, the image has no alt text. If you see alt="", the alt is intentionally empty (decorative). For a single image, Inspect is fast. For a full page with 30 or 50 images, opening Inspect on each one takes ten minutes. This checker scans every image in one pass and returns a CSV with image URL, alt value, and classification. Use Inspect for spot-checks and this tool for full-page audits before shipping a redesign or after a CMS migration.

Use this checker for a full-page audit, or check individual images with browser DevTools. For the full audit, enter your page URL, set the decorative toggle to Yes if you want WCAG-compliant empty alts to count as good, and hit Check alt text. The output shows every image with its alt value, a classification (missing / decorative / good / suspicious), and a coverage score. For single images, right-click and choose Inspect, then read the alt attribute on the <img> tag. For social platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn, alt text is editable in the post-creation flow but not always visible after posting. For images in WordPress or Webflow, the alt field lives in the media library or block settings. Run a full page check before publishing and after every CMS migration to catch alts that get stripped during template changes.

Alt text lives in the HTML source of any webpage and is visible through several methods. In a browser, right-click an image and select Inspect, then read the alt attribute on the <img> tag. In Microsoft Office, right-click an image and select View Alt Text, or select the image and choose Picture Format then Alt Text. In Google Docs, right-click and choose Alt text. In WordPress, the alt field is in the media library and the block editor. In Webflow, it is in the image settings panel. For a full page audit across every image at once, paste the URL into this checker and the output shows every alt value plus a thumbnail of each image. Screen readers also surface alt text when users navigate through page content, which is the original purpose of the attribute.

The author or creator of the image is the right person to write alt text because they understand the context and the reason the image was added. A photographer who shoots a product image knows whether the angle, color, or detail matters most. A writer who embeds a chart in a blog post knows what data point the chart illustrates. Handing alt-text writing to a developer or accessibility consultant after the fact loses that context. In a content team, the workflow should put alt-text fields directly in the publishing flow (CMS, design tool) so the author writes the alt at the moment they upload the image. Use this checker as a final QA pass to catch alts the author skipped or wrote poorly. For sites with 1,000+ images, consider a quarterly audit cycle: 25% of pages each quarter, prioritising the top 100 traffic-driving URLs.

Skip descriptive alt text only when the image is purely decorative and adds no information, such as a spacer GIF, a background pattern, a divider line, or a decorative icon next to text that already says the same thing. In those cases, set alt="" (empty string) and ideally add role="presentation" so screen readers know to skip the image rather than guessing. Never omit the alt attribute entirely; missing alt forces screen readers to announce the filename, which is usually noise. Also skip alt text on CSS background images, which screen readers ignore by default. The 2024 WebAIM Million report found that 11% of decorative images had verbose alt text that should have been empty, creating screen-reader fatigue. This checker flags both gaps: missing alts on content images and verbose alts on probable decoratives.

Ctrl+Shift+R (Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) performs a hard refresh in Chrome, reloading the page and bypassing the browser cache. It forces Chrome to re-download every asset, including images, CSS, and JavaScript, instead of pulling from cached copies. This matters for alt-text auditing in two ways. First, if you updated alt attributes via your CMS but the page still shows the old alts in DevTools, a hard refresh forces the new HTML to load. Second, if images are not rendering and you suspect a caching issue rather than a real broken link, a hard refresh confirms whether the image actually loads. After a hard refresh, re-run this checker to audit the freshly fetched page. The tool itself fetches a fresh copy of the page on every run, so it is not affected by your browser cache, but DevTools spot-checks are.

WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.1.1 (Non-text Content, Level A) requires that all non-text content have a text alternative serving the equivalent purpose, with specific exceptions for decorative content, controls, and CAPTCHAs. For images, this means every meaningful <img> tag needs a non-empty alt attribute that describes the image. Decorative images need alt="". CAPTCHA images need alt text describing the purpose, not the puzzle. WCAG 2.2 keeps this criterion unchanged. ADA lawsuits in the US frequently cite missing alt text as a primary failure, with over 4,000 web accessibility lawsuits filed in 2023 alone. The 2024 WebAIM Million report found 54% of top homepages had missing alt text. This checker grades each image against the WCAG rule and gives you a coverage score so you know whether the page passes Level A on this criterion before formal audit.

Aim for 5-125 characters per alt, with most good alts landing in the 40-80 character range. Screen readers cut off alts after roughly 125 characters in some implementations, and Google's image-search algorithm appears to stop weighting content past that length. Anything under 5 characters is usually too vague (think "logo" or "icon"). Anything over 200 characters reads as keyword stuffing or describes detail the user did not ask for. For complex images like infographics, charts, or diagrams, use a short alt (under 125 chars) plus a longer description in the surrounding paragraph or via the aria-describedby attribute. This checker flags alts under 5 chars as suspicious and alts over 200 chars as overlong, so you see both extremes in one audit pass.

Use alt="" when the image is purely decorative and adds no information that text alone misses. Examples include spacer GIFs, ornamental dividers, background patterns, decorative icons next to text that says the same thing, and CSS-style flourishes. Pair alt="" with role="presentation" to be explicit about decorative intent. The empty string tells screen readers to skip the image cleanly. Missing the alt attribute entirely (no alt= at all) forces screen readers to announce the filename, which is the wrong outcome for decorative images. The 2024 WCAG.com audit guide notes that 11% of decorative images carry verbose alts that should be empty, and 8% of meaningful images carry empty alts that should be descriptive. Toggle the Treat empty alt='' as intentional decorative field to control how this checker handles ambiguous empty alts on your site.

Filename-as-alt (alt="IMG_2847.jpg" or alt="screen-shot-2024-01-15.png") tells screen readers to literally read the filename character by character, which sounds like noise and conveys nothing about the image. It also gives Google Image Search nothing useful to rank against, since random alphanumeric filenames carry no semantic content. The 2024 Ahrefs image-search study found that pages with filename alts on more than 20% of images ranked 40% lower in Google Image Search than pages with descriptive alts on every image. This checker flags filename patterns (IMG_, DSC_, screen-shot, .jpg in the alt value, etc.) as suspicious so you can fix them quickly. Replace alt="IMG_2847.jpg" with what the image actually shows: alt="Black leather Chelsea boot, side profile". The fix takes 10 seconds per image and recovers both accessibility and image-SEO value.

Google reads alt text in two places: as the primary ranking signal for Google Image Search, and as content context for the surrounding page in regular web search. For image search, Google ranks images partly by how well the alt text matches the search query, alongside filename, surrounding text, and image quality signals. For web search, Google uses alt text to understand what a page is about when images carry significant content (charts, product photos, infographics). A 2024 Ahrefs study of 1.2 million image-search results found pages with descriptive alts on every above-the-fold image ranked 30-50% higher in Google Image Search than pages with missing or filename alts. Google does not penalise missing alt text directly in regular search rankings, but missing alts forfeit the image-search traffic and weaken topical relevance signals. Use this checker plus the website-metadata-checker for a full on-page SEO audit.

Alt text (alt="...") is the text alternative for the image content, read by screen readers and used by search engines for image ranking. The title attribute (title="...") is supplemental text shown as a tooltip on hover in some browsers, and is largely ignored by screen readers and search engines. Alt is required by WCAG. Title is optional and often unhelpful since mobile users cannot hover, and many desktop screen readers skip it. If you have something useful to say about an image, put it in the alt or in the surrounding paragraph, not in the title. The 2024 WebAIM survey of screen-reader users found 73% of respondents preferred alt text over title attributes for image information. This checker audits the alt attribute only, since title is rarely worth optimising. Focus your effort on writing strong alts and skipping titles unless you have a specific reason to use them.

Screen readers like NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver announce images by reading the alt attribute aloud, prefaced by the word "image" or "graphic" depending on the screen reader. For <img alt="Black leather Chelsea boot">, NVDA announces "graphic, Black leather Chelsea boot". For <img alt=""> paired with role="presentation", the screen reader skips the image entirely. For <img> with no alt attribute at all, most screen readers fall back to reading the filename or the URL, which sounds like "graphic, I M G underscore 2 8 4 7 dot J P G". The 2024 WebAIM screen-reader survey found 67% of respondents rated missing or poor alt text as a "very serious" barrier to web use, ranking it above missing form labels and broken keyboard navigation. Run this checker before any release to catch missing and suspicious alts before screen-reader users hit them.

Good alt text is short (40-80 characters typical, 125 max), describes what the image shows in plain language, and adds information not already in the surrounding text. Lead with the most important visual element. For a product photo: "Red Adidas Samba, three-quarter view". For a chart: "Bar chart showing 40% revenue growth Q1 to Q4 2024". For a portrait: "Sarah Chen, CEO of Acme, smiling at camera". Skip phrases like "image of" or "picture of" since screen readers already announce the image. Skip the filename. Skip keyword stuffing. For decorative images, use alt="" with role="presentation". For complex images like infographics, write a short alt and put the full description in the surrounding paragraph or in an aria-describedby element. This checker flags alts under 5 chars, over 200 chars, all-caps, single-word, and filename patterns so you can rewrite the weak ones in one pass.