Are your Shopify product images accessible to screen reader users?
Most Shopify product images carry empty or useless alt text, and screen reader shoppers lose the details that sell. How to audit your image alts, what good alt text looks like, and the theme fixes that matter.
Why image alt text matters for commerce
Product images do the selling on a Shopify store. Color, pattern, texture, fit, and scale are all communicated visually, and a screen reader user gets none of it unless the image carries a text alternative. When alt text is missing, the screen reader announces the filename or skips the image entirely, which means the shopper is deciding between variants they cannot distinguish. That is not just an accessibility gap; it is a lost sale.
The ADA lawsuits hitting Shopify merchants increasingly cite missing or meaningless image alternatives as evidence of an inaccessible store. Alt text is one of the cheapest fixes in accessibility and one of the most commonly neglected.
What most Shopify stores get wrong
The typical audit finds three patterns. First, empty alt attributes everywhere, which tells the screen reader the image is decorative. A product photo is never decorative. Second, filenames as alt text: hearing "IMG-4821-final-2.jpg" read aloud helps nobody. Third, keyword-stuffed alt text written for SEO, like "blue cotton dress women's summer dress cheap dresses online", which is painful to hear and often inaccurate.
Shopify themes pull alt text from the image's alt field in the product media editor, but many merchants never fill it in, and theme developers rarely make it obvious that the field exists. Bulk-imported products are the worst offenders: hundreds of images with blank alts and no one assigned to fix them.
What good product alt text looks like
Good alt text describes what a buyer needs to know: the object, its key visual traits, and anything that distinguishes it from the sibling variants. "Navy linen button-down shirt with a relaxed fit, shown on a model" beats both the empty alt and the keyword salad. For variant images, name the variant: "Same shirt in white" tells the shopper exactly what changed.
Keep it under about 125 characters when possible, since some screen readers cut off longer text. Skip phrases like "image of" or "picture of"; the screen reader already announces the element as an image. Describe, do not editorialize: "stunning dress" is not information.
Which images can stay empty
Not every image needs alt text. Purely decorative graphics, divider flourishes, and background textures should keep empty alt attributes so screen readers skip them. The test is simple: if removing the image would remove information a shopper needs, it needs alt text. Product photos, lifestyle shots showing fit or scale, and images with text baked in all fail that test and need descriptions.
How to audit and fix at scale
Start with your best sellers, not the whole catalog. Open the top twenty product pages with a screen reader or an accessibility checker and note which images announce nothing useful. In Shopify, edit alt text in the product media section; for bulk fixes, export products via CSV, fill the image alt text column, and reimport. Apps that auto-generate alt text with AI can clear a backlog fast, but review the output: automated descriptions are often technically present and practically useless.
Then fix the process. Add alt text to the product-launch checklist so new images never ship blank. Train whoever uploads photography that the alt field is mandatory, not optional. A store that writes alt text at upload time never needs another bulk cleanup.
The honest bottom line
Product image alt text is one of the highest-return accessibility fixes a Shopify store can make: it costs minutes per product, directly affects whether blind shoppers can buy, and shows up in demand letters when it is missing. Audit your top products this week, write descriptions a buyer would actually use, and make the alt field part of every product launch.