Where Website Builders Hide the Alt-Text Field

The mistake almost everyone makes is assuming a builder has "an alt text setting". It does not. It has a field in each image context, and the contexts are more numerous than you think.

On a typical builder site, an image can arrive through the main image element, a gallery, a slideshow, a background on a section, a logo in the header, a product photo in a store, a team-member card, a testimonial avatar, an icon in a feature list, a favicon, and an embed from somewhere else entirely. Some of those have a field. Some have a field somewhere unexpected. Some have none, because the platform has decided the image is decorative on your behalf.

That last case is the interesting one and it is not always wrong. A background texture genuinely is decorative, and SC 1.1.1 Non-text Content is satisfied for decorative images by marking them so they are ignored, not by describing them. The problem is when a platform treats a meaningful image as decorative because of where you put it — a section background carrying the only copy of your opening hours, say.

WordPress.com puts alt text in the block settings panel, and the field appears in the Image, Gallery, Cover and Media & Text blocks. That is a reasonably complete set for the editor's own blocks. What it does not cover is images introduced by third-party plugins and page builders, which follow their own rules entirely, and this is the recurring theme of the platform: the core is coherent and the ecosystem is not.

Squarespace provides alt-text fields and lists them among its built-in accessibility features, alongside media captions and transcripts. The wrinkle people hit is that some image contexts historically inherited their alternative text from the image's filename or caption rather than from a dedicated field, so "I did not write any alt text" and "there is no alt text" are not the same statement. Check what is actually in the markup rather than what you remember typing.

Wix has alt-text fields in the image settings, and — usefully — the Accessibility Wizard will find missing ones at page level for you, including inside pages generated by its Stores and Blog apps. This is the clearest advantage of a built-in scanner: not that it writes anything, but that it tells you where you did not look.

Shopify requires the alt attribute on all images as a condition of a theme being admitted to the Theme Store, which sets a floor on the theme's own markup. Your product images are a separate matter and are edited in the product's media settings. Apps are a third matter again, and are where most Shopify alt-text problems actually live.

Webflow exposes the attribute directly, because Webflow exposes the markup directly. The trade is the familiar one: nothing is hidden from you and nothing is done for you.

Check all of this in your own editor before relying on it. Builders move these panels without announcements, and a menu location is the most perishable kind of fact there is.

If your section background carries text baked into the image, or is doing real communicative work, a CSS background will usually not expose it to assistive technology at all. There is no field because, as far as the platform is concerned, there is no image element.

Two fixes. Either put the information in real text on top of the background — which is better anyway, because real text can be zoomed, restyled, translated and selected — or place a genuine image element instead of a background. Text baked into a picture is a bad idea for about six independent reasons and this is only one of them.

Having found the field, the second half of the problem is that most alternative text is written as though a machine will read it and a human never will. Backwards.

Describe the purpose, not the picture. SC 1.1.1 asks for text serving an equivalent purpose. If a photograph of your shopfront is there to help someone recognise the building, "red brick shopfront on the corner, green awning over the door" does the job. "Image of a building" does not.

Leave decorative images empty. Not missing — empty. An alt attribute with nothing in it tells assistive technology to skip the image. An absent attribute causes many screen readers to read the filename out loud instead, which is how visitors end up hearing "underscore final underscore v2 dot jpeg".

Do not start with "image of". The technology already knows it is an image and announces it.

If the image is also a link, describe the destination. The alternative text of a linked image is that link's accessible name. "Home" is more useful than "logo".

Text inside an image goes in the alt text. All of it. If your promotional banner says "20% off until Friday", that sentence needs to exist somewhere a screen reader can reach.

Charts need more room than an alt attribute. Put the data in a table near it, or write the finding out in the surrounding paragraph. A description of a chart's shape is not the same as its information.

1. Open your five most important pages.
2. In each, note every image: header, hero, body, gallery, footer, product.
3. For each one, ask whether it carries meaning or is decoration.
4. Find the field. If there is no field, that context needs looking at.
5. Write the alternative text as though describing the page aloud to someone on the phone.
6. Check the result in the rendered page rather than in the editor, because the editor is where the intention lives and the page is where the attribute lives.

That last step matters more than it sounds. Several of the failures in this category are not authoring failures at all — the text was written and the platform did not put it where it belongs.

Which platform you are doing this on affects how much of it you have to chase, and that is one of the things the assessment of ADA-compliant website builders is for. None of it is legal advice, and none of these platforms makes a site compliant by having the field.