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Accessibility

How to write alt text for images

An image with no alt attribute is announced as nothing at all, so any information carried by the picture is simply absent for a screen reader user. Decorative images need an explicitly empty alt so they are skipped rather than guessed at.

What 13x checks

This is rule accessibility.image-alt in the public registry: Images have alt attributes. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
Accessibility
Score weight
8 of the readiness score
Scope
Reported as skipped when the page renders only with JavaScript
Applies
To every site

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

of images have no alt attribute.

html code
<!-- Informative: describe what it conveys, not what it looks like -->
<img src="/chart.png" alt="Revenue grew from $2k to $18k between January and June" />

<!-- Decorative: empty alt, so screen readers skip it -->
<img src="/divider.svg" alt="" />

<!-- Wrong: no attribute at all — the reader falls back to the filename -->
<img src="/hero-final-v3.png" />

The distinction that matters: alt="" is a deliberate statement that the image carries no information. A missing attribute is an omission, and the screen reader reads the file name instead.

For a logo, the alt text is the company name. For an image inside a link, describe the destination, not the picture.

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