This free tool checks every image on your page for alt text, the short description a screen reader reads out in place of the picture. It finds the ones with nothing at all, the ones where a file name got used by mistake, and the links that are just an unlabelled image.
Checks one page at a time. A gallery or a recent-work page is usually where the problems are.
Around one in five people in the UK has a disability, and a good number of them use a screen reader, which reads a page aloud. When it reaches an image it looks for the alt text and reads that out. If there is none, it falls back to the file name. So instead of hearing "new bathroom suite fitted in Bolton", the visitor hears "D S C underscore 0 0 4 2 dot jpeg".
Nobody is going to email and tell you. They will simply leave, and you will never know they were there. That is what makes this worth checking rather than assuming: it is invisible from the outside, it takes minutes to fix, and under the Equality Act you have a duty not to make your service unreasonably difficult for a disabled person to use.
There is a commercial side too. Google cannot see what is in a photograph, so alt text is how it works out what your images show. For a trade with photos of finished work, that is the difference between appearing in image search and not existing there at all. It is one of the few jobs that helps disabled visitors and your ranking in exactly the same stroke.
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image. Someone using a screen reader hears it read out in place of the picture. Without it the reader falls back to the file name, so a blind visitor hears something like D S C underscore 0 0 4 2 dot jpeg, which tells them nothing at all.
No, it is often exactly right. An empty alt marks an image as decorative so a screen reader skips it, which is what you want for a border, a spacer or a background flourish. Describing those would just get in the way. This tool counts them separately rather than treating them as faults.
For most UK businesses the Equality Act means you must not make it unreasonably difficult for a disabled person to use your service, and a website counts. There is no inspection regime for small firms, but it is a real duty, and images with no description are the most common way a site falls short.
Yes. Google cannot see what is in a photograph, so alt text is how it works out what your images show. That is what gets you into image search, which for trades showing finished work can be a real source of enquiries. It also helps Google understand what the page as a whole is about.
Say what is in the picture, plainly, in under about 125 characters. New bathroom suite fitted in Bolton beats bathroom, and both beat nothing. Do not start with picture of, since the screen reader already says it is an image, and do not stuff in keywords, which Google treats as a negative.
If you are editing your images anyway, it is worth checking they are not also far too big.