What is alt text?
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and shown in place of the picture when it fails to load. It describes what the image shows and why it is there, in one plain sentence, so someone who never sees the picture loses nothing.
Why it matters to a shop
A shop site is mostly pictures — the storefront, the dishes, the room, the work you finished last month. To a blind customer using a screen reader, and to a search engine, every one of those is currently a blank space. If your best-selling dish is only ever named inside a photograph, nothing outside that photograph knows what it is called. It is also the one accessibility fix a shop owner can finish alone in an afternoon. You start from one of 40 industry templates, so the photos in your first draft belong to nobody's shop; the 15 design styles change how a photo is cropped and framed, but none of them writes the description for you. Swap in your own photo and write its description in the same sitting.
How to write one
- Ask what the picture is doing on the page. A storefront photo helps someone find you: “The shop front on Mill Street, with outdoor seating under a green awning.” A dish photo is selling something: “Braised short rib on mashed potato in a shallow white bowl, with a sprig of thyme.” Write that, not “photo”.
- Keep it to one sentence, and skip “image of” or “picture of” — a screen reader already announces that it is an image. Any text inside the picture (a price, a notice, the words on your sign) must go in, because nothing else can read it.
- Leave it empty on purely decorative images: a divider line, a background texture, a repeated icon. An empty alt tells a screen reader to skip the image, which is better than making someone listen to “decorative swoosh” forty times.
Common mistake: Stuffing keywords into alt text instead of describing the picture. It makes the page worse for the person listening, and it is exactly the pattern search engines are built to discount.