What is alt text?
Alt text (alternative text) is a short written description added to an image through the HTML alt attribute. When the image cannot be seen — because a shopper uses a screen reader, the file fails to load, or a crawler is indexing the page — the alt text stands in for it. On a clothing product page, an image of a sweater might carry alt text like "women's cream cable-knit crewneck sweater, front view" so anyone or anything that can't see the photo still understands what the product is.
Every meaningful image on an ecommerce store should have alt text: product shots, on-model photography, lifestyle scenes, detail crops, and size charts. Purely decorative images — background flourishes, spacer graphics — should use an empty alt attribute (alt="") so assistive technology skips them instead of announcing clutter.
How to write good alt text
Describe what is actually in the frame: product type, color, material, and the distinguishing detail a shopper would notice. Aim for roughly five to fifteen words and stay under about 125 characters. Don't start with "image of" or "photo of" — a screen reader already announces that it's an image, so the words are wasted. Skip keyword stuffing; cramming search terms into the attribute reads badly aloud and search engines discount it.
A repeatable pattern keeps a large catalog consistent and fast to author: garment type, then key attribute, then color, then view. "Men's slim-fit oxford shirt, light blue, sleeve cuff detail" follows that shape and tells both a shopper and a crawler what they're looking at.
Alt text vs. file names, titles, and captions
These get confused often. The file name is the image's name on the server (a descriptive slug like cream-cable-knit-sweater.jpg helps a little). The title attribute shows a tooltip on hover and is largely ignored by screen readers. A caption is visible body text near the image. Alt text is none of those: it's the read-aloud, machine-readable substitute for the picture itself, and it carries the most weight for accessibility and image search.
One description per image
A product page usually shows several photos of the same item — front, back, fabric close-up, on-model shot. Each deserves its own alt text describing what that specific frame adds. Reusing one string across every image gives a screen reader user no way to tell the views apart and wastes the chance to describe each angle for image search.
- Front studio shot: "black ribbed midi dress, front view on white background"
- Detail crop: "close-up of black ribbed dress fabric texture and side seam"
- On-model image: "black ribbed midi dress worn by a model, three-quarter pose"
- Size chart: "size chart for black ribbed midi dress in inches and centimeters"
Why alt text matters for SEO and accessibility
On the accessibility side, alt text is the difference between a usable store and a closed door for shoppers who rely on screen readers. Missing or generic alt text is one of the most common WCAG failures flagged in accessibility audits, and for online retailers it can carry legal exposure under standards like WCAG 2.1 and the ADA. Writing real descriptions is cheap insurance and the right thing for customers.
On the SEO side, alt text is the primary signal Google uses to understand an image, which feeds Google Images — a traffic source most stores leave on the table. Descriptive, unique alt text on product photography helps those images surface for relevant searches and gives the surrounding page extra topical context. The two goals reinforce each other: text that genuinely describes the picture for a blind shopper is also the text that ranks it.
Alt text at catalog scale
Writing accurate alt text for thousands of SKUs is the bottleneck, not the rule itself. Because WearView generates on-model and product imagery from a known garment and prompt, the description of what's in each frame is already structured, which makes it straightforward to produce specific, non-duplicate alt text per image instead of pasting the SKU name onto every photo.