Image alt checker. Every <img> in one paste.

Missing alt means the <img> tag has no alt attribute at all. Screen readers fall back to announcing the file path or filename, which is almost always meaningless — a user hears "image: forward-slash assets forward-slash hero dot jpg" and gets nothing useful. WCAG 2.1 SC 1.1.1 explicitly requires every non-decorative image to have alt text, so missing alt is a Level A failure.

Empty alt (alt="") is intentional and correct for decorative images: a background grain texture, a stylized horizontal-rule divider, an icon that visually duplicates an adjacent text label. The empty string tells the screen reader "skip this — it conveys no information beyond visual styling." Empty alt is required for these cases; without it, the screen reader announces the filename and clutters the listening experience.

Empty alt inside a link is a serious failure even though the alt itself is technically valid syntax. A clickable image with empty alt has no accessible name; the screen reader announces "link" with no description. Users cannot know what the link does. Either give the image meaningful alt describing the link's destination ("Book a consultation"), or wrap the image with the link text included visibly outside the image.

Descriptive alt describes the image's role in context. The same photo on a team page might have alt "Maya Chen, Head of Engineering, in the NYC office"; on an article about Series A funding might have alt "Maya Chen, founder, presenting at Y Combinator demo day". Same image, different alt because the role differs. Generic single-word alt ("image", "photo") is technically present but conveys nothing — we flag it as a warning.

Filename-as-alt is the symptom of a CMS or export pipeline that copied the filename into alt by default. alt="IMG_4523.jpg", alt="DSC_002.png", alt="Untitled-3.gif": all useless. Many CMS systems do this if no alt is provided at upload time. The checker flags any alt matching common camera-export or auto-numbered patterns.

Keyword stuffing in alt text was a 2008-era SEO trick that no longer works and now risks WCAG-spam penalties. Alt text should describe the image's function in context, not chant a list of every service keyword. The checker uses a simple heuristic — repeated words, missing verbs, eight-or-more comma-separated terms — to flag stuffed alts.