Missing alt text used to be an SEO footnote. Since June 2025 it's also a compliance exposure — and it remains one of the most common failures on the web.
The deadline already passed
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) became enforceable on 28 June 2025. It requires a wide range of digital products and services sold into the EU to meet accessibility standards aligned with EN 301 549, which is built on WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Text alternatives for images are a Level A requirement — the most basic tier — so alt text isn't optional or aspirational under the EAA. It's table stakes.
This reaches well beyond Europe: if you sell to EU customers, the rules can apply regardless of where you're based. Penalties are set by each member state and can run to six figures or a percentage of revenue.
The simplest rule, still broken everywhere
Alt text is about as basic as web accessibility gets, and the web still fails it at scale. The WebAIM Million 2026 report — an audit of the top one million home pages — found missing alternative text on 53% of home pages, making it the second most common accessibility failure after low-contrast text. More than one in four images on popular home pages had missing, questionable or repetitive alt text.
The number improved only modestly year over year. For something this easy to fix, that's a striking gap — and a clear opening for any team willing to close it.
Three reasons it matters at once
- Legal risk. Under the EAA — and the litigation already common under US accessibility law — missing alt text is a documented, easily detected failure.
- Classic image SEO. Alt text still helps search engines understand images and surface them in image search.
- AI search. Answer engines increasingly lift well-described images into their responses — good alt text is now a visibility lever, not just a compliance checkbox.
What good alt text looks like
Useful alt text is descriptive and contextual: it conveys the purpose of the image on the page, not a generic label. It captures any text embedded in the image. It skips filler like “image of” or “photo of,” and it doesn't keyword-stuff. Decorative images get an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them. None of this is hard — it's just rarely done consistently at scale.
Fix it at scale
That “at scale” part is the real barrier. Hand-writing alt text for hundreds of images is exactly the kind of task that never gets finished. The AI Alt Text Generator writes descriptive, WCAG-aligned alt text for up to 30 images at once — turning a backlog into a batch job.
If half the web still gets this wrong, getting it right is a cheap, fast edge. Bulk-generate alt text for your image library on the AI Alt Text Generator page.