Shopify makes it fast to launch a catalog and almost as fast to fill it with alt text that's wrong, missing, or copied onto the wrong variant. Here's where that happens, how to fix it in the admin, and how to check it's actually correct — not just present.
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A Shopify store is a commercial website with a checkout, and that changes the legal picture in the US. Federal ADA Title III website-accessibility lawsuit filings rose from 2,452 in 2024 to 3,117 in 2025 (adatitleiii.com) — this is a growing area of litigation, not a one-off news story. Alt text is a plain, visible thing for a plaintiff's expert to point to: an image either has an accurate description or it doesn't, and there's no technical judgment call to argue about.
If you sell to shoppers in the EU, there's a second angle. E-commerce is explicitly named as a covered sector under the European Accessibility Act, which has applied since 28 June 2025 — regardless of where your business is based. There is one honest carve-out: microenterprises providing services — fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million annual turnover or balance-sheet total, both conditions required — are exempt from the service obligations (Fieldfisher). A lot of small Shopify merchants genuinely qualify. If you've grown past either threshold, the exemption goes with it.
None of this is legal advice. If EAA or ADA exposure is a real question for your business, talk to a lawyer who covers accessibility law in the relevant jurisdiction.
These aren't hypothetical. They're the predictable result of how Shopify stores get built and grown.
Import a supplier feed or bulk-upload a few hundred SKUs and Shopify doesn't invent alt text for you. Unless someone deliberately fills it in, the image either has no alt text at all or, if it was set during import, may just carry over whatever the filename or feed metadata happened to be — DSC_08213.jpg is not a product description.
Duplicate a listing to create a new colourway and it's easy to duplicate the alt text along with it. The result is a red jacket's photos still labelled "Navy wool jacket, front view" — accurate for a different product, wrong for the one a customer is actually looking at.
Banner graphics, section dividers, and background textures that come with a theme often aren't marked as decorative with an empty alt="". A screen reader user gets an unhelpful filename or a designer's SEO-keyword alt text read aloud on every single page load.
Review widgets, size guides, upsell carousels, and other installed apps insert images, buttons and sliders directly into your theme. That markup wasn't written by you, and it isn't automatically checked by anything you did to your own product pages — it needs its own look.
One product at a time, this is a five-minute job per image.
In your Shopify admin, go to Products and click into the listing you want to fix.
Click directly on the product photo in the media gallery to open its details.
Use Add alt text (or edit what's there) and describe what the photo actually shows — the colour, the material, the angle, anything a shopper would need if they couldn't see the picture. Not the product title repeated verbatim, not a filename.
Each colour or style variant has its own images and needs its own accurate alt text. This is the step that gets skipped most often.
Save the product, then view the live listing to confirm the change took.
That doesn't scale past a handful of products. For a bigger catalog, export your products to CSV from Products > Export, edit the alt text columns in a spreadsheet, and re-import the file to push the changes back across every image at once. It's still manual work — someone has to write or check each description — but it turns hundreds of individual edits into one file you can work through in a spreadsheet.
Shopify's own product image editor includes a button that generates a suggested alt text description automatically, at no extra cost. That's a genuinely useful starting point, and there's no reason not to use it.
The gap it leaves is verification. An AI suggestion describes what it thinks is in the frame at the moment you generate it — it doesn't know that the same base photo is also attached to your red variant and your blue variant with different alt text needed for each, and it won't come back later to check whether a re-used image, a swapped photo, or a copy-pasted listing has left the wrong description sitting on the wrong product. Generating a suggestion and confirming it's still correct for the specific variant it's attached to are two different jobs.
Point GotAlt at your live storefront URL — no app install, no admin access needed, nothing to connect. It reads the page the same way a browser or a screen reader does.
Useful for a first draft. Not a check that anything is still accurate.
Opening the image file costs money — roughly 5–15¢ per page in vision-model calls, depending on image size — which is why the deep audit is a paid, capped feature rather than unlimited and free.
The free scan also checks 15 other things on any page — missing form labels, missing headings, page language, link text, and more — up to 3 pages a day with no signup. The paid deep audit is designed to run the vision check across a 250-page catalogue on a schedule and flag regressions. It is in early access and onboarded by hand — email us if you want a slot.
No. GotAlt isn't a Shopify app and isn't affiliated with Shopify. It works against any live URL, including a Shopify storefront — you point the scanner at your store's address and it reads the page the same way a visitor's browser would. Nothing to install, nothing connected to your admin.
No tool, including this one, can promise that, and this isn't legal advice. Accurate alt text removes one of the more visible and easily-cited issues from a site, which is a genuinely good reason to fix it — it just isn't a guarantee against litigation, and nothing that claims otherwise should be trusted.
Yes — alt text is also what search engines and other tools use to understand an image when they can't "see" the picture, so accurate descriptions tend to help image search visibility too. That's a side benefit, not the reason to get it right; the reason is that a screen reader user relying on that text deserves an accurate one.
The same fix logic applies: something on the page needs a text alternative and doesn't have an accurate one. Scanning the live page catches it regardless of whether the markup came from your theme, a manual edit, or an installed app — the fix itself usually means going into that app's settings or contacting its developer, since you may not have direct control over markup it injects.
No. The scanner fetches the page HTML your server sends to a normal, unauthenticated visitor. A password-protected or staging store won't return real content until it's live and publicly reachable.
Run your Shopify storefront URL through the free scan — missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, broken headings and more, no signup required. Then see whether the alt text you already have is telling the truth.
Scan my site — free