How One Missing Alt Tag Started a Legal Avalanche

It started with one product image. A pair of shoes on an e-commerce site. No alt text. Just a blank void where a description should have been. A screen reader user encountered it, could not tell what the product was, and filed a complaint. Seems proportionate so far, right? Just wait.

That complaint became a demand letter. The demand letter became a lawsuit. The lawsuit revealed that the site had over 2,000 images without alt text. The settlement cost six figures. The remediation cost another five figures. All because nobody typed a few words into an HTML attribute. This is the web development equivalent of losing your house because you forgot to put the cap back on the toothpaste.

The Most Sued Accessibility Issue on the Web (And It Is Not Even Close)

Published accessibility lawsuit data consistently shows that missing alt text is the single most cited violation in web accessibility complaints. It appears in the vast majority of demand letters. The reason is painfully simple: it is objectively measurable, clearly required by accessibility guidelines, and trivially easy to verify. A lawyer does not need to understand code. They just need to run a scan and count the images without alt attributes. Your website basically hands them a pre-written case file.

This makes missing alt text the low-hanging fruit for accessibility litigation. It is clear-cut, hard to argue against, and demonstrates a pattern of inaccessibility that strengthens the overall case. Imagine being sued for something that would have taken you an afternoon to fix. That is not a hypothetical. It happens every week.

What Good Alt Text Actually Looks Like (No, "Image" Is Not Good Alt Text)

Writing good alt text is not complicated, but there are patterns that work and patterns that make screen readers sound like they are having a stroke:

• Product images: Describe the product. "Red running shoe with white sole, side view" is useful. "shoe.jpg" is not. "DSC_0847_edited_final_v2.png" is actively hostile.
• Informational images: Describe the information. "Bar chart showing 45% increase in mobile traffic from 2024 to 2025" conveys what a sighted user would learn from the chart. "Chart" does not. "Graph thing" definitely does not.
• Decorative images: Use empty alt text (alt=""). Decorative borders, background textures, and spacer images should be invisible to screen readers. Adding alt text to them just creates noise, like a narrator who describes the wallpaper pattern in every room of a murder mystery.
• Icons with text: If an icon sits next to text that already describes the action, the icon should have alt="" to avoid redundancy. If the icon is the only indicator of the action (like a standalone magnifying glass for search), it needs descriptive alt text. Otherwise screen readers just say "image" and the user has to guess what it does. Fun game? No. No it is not.

The Audit That Takes Minutes (The Lawsuit Takes Months)

Here is the thing about alt text: it is the easiest accessibility issue to find and the easiest to fix. An automated scan can identify every image on your site without alt text in seconds. Then it is just a matter of writing descriptions. A site with 200 images might take an afternoon. A site with 2,000 might take a few days. Either way, it is dramatically cheaper than a six-figure settlement and several orders of magnitude less stressful than explaining to your boss why you are being sued over something called an "alt attribute."

The real question is not whether you can afford to add alt text. It is whether you can afford not to. Because somewhere out there, someone is running an automated scan on your site right now. And if your images are unlabeled, you might be the next star of a demand letter. Break a leg! Wait, not like that.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, professional, or compliance advice. SCOUTb2 is an automated scanning tool that helps identify common issues but does not guarantee full compliance with any standard or regulation.