Empty alt or missing alt: what your image audit actually counts

You install an audit tool and it tells you “340 images with no alt text”. The number is alarming, which is its job. Before paying to make it go away, it is worth knowing what it counts, because two very different situations hide inside that total.

The two cases, and why they do not add up

A divider, a background gradient, an icon sitting next to a word that is already written: reading “decorative image” out loud helps nobody. The explicit empty value is the right answer, and a theme that produces it is doing its job. Flagging it as a defect amounts to blaming your theme for being well built.

What the measurement shows

We measured 173 public Shopify storefronts, thirteen pages each, 40 388 images in total. In that sample, 2,9 % of images carry no alt attribute at all, and 11,1 % carry an empty one. In other words, for every image that is truly silent, nearly four are marked decorative.

Per store, the median is 2 images with no attribute against 15 with an empty one, and 123 stores out of 173 have more empty ones than missing ones. A tool that adds the two together inflates the problem it reports, on almost every store, and always in the same direction.

The defect nobody counts

There is a third case, and it is the most common one on product pages: six photos of the same item all carrying the product name as alt text. The attribute is there, it is filled, so no automated audit flags it. And it says nothing about what is in the picture: not the colour, not the material, not the angle, not the detail the shopper was trying to check.

How to find out, on your own store, in five minutes

1. Open your three best selling products in the Shopify admin.
2. Click the first photo of each: the Details panel shows the Alt text field, right under the file name.
3. Sort what you read into three piles: empty, product name repeated, or a real description.
4. If the second pile is the biggest, that is the one to work on, and no tool would have told you.

What you find on three products is almost always true of the rest of the catalogue: the photos were added the same way, by the same person, with the same tool.

And when the catalogue is too large

Three hundred products with three photos each means nine hundred texts to write, and that is where tools earn their place. It is also where our app works: it looks at each photo and proposes a description of what is visible, which you review before anything is saved. It does not count an empty attribute as a defect, for the reason explained above, and it does not rewrite a description you wrote yourself.

Before installing one, ask it the question this article is about: what exactly do you count? A tool that cannot answer will always sell you a problem bigger than the one you have.