Three states, not two
Every image on every page, with enough detail to tell a defect from a decision.
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01
One row per image
Every img element on the page, with its source, in document order. Nothing is deduplicated, so an icon used forty times appears forty times, which is usually the point.
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02
Missing, empty, or present
No alt attribute at all is a defect. An empty one is a deliberate statement that the image carries no meaning. Present is present. Three columns, three different conversations.
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03
The alt text itself
Not just whether it exists. You get the string, so IMG_4021.jpg and “image” show up for what they are rather than counting as a pass.
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04
Twenty-five pages in one table
Sort by the alt column and every gap across a whole section of the site lines up together, which is the only way this job is ever finished.
Five things the column reveals
Accessibility first, image search second. In that order, because that is the order the law and the user are in.
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No alt attribute at all
A screen reader falls back to reading the filename, which is how a visitor ends up hearing “hero underscore v two final dot jpeg”.
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An empty alt on a meaningful image
The most common false pass. The attribute is there, a checker ticks it off, and a chart carrying the whole argument of the page is announced as nothing.
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The filename as the alt text
IMG_4021.jpg in the alt attribute is no alt text with extra steps. It is also the easiest thing on this list to find: sort the column.
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Alt text that repeats the caption
A screen reader reads both, one after the other. Say it once, in whichever of the two the sighted reader also gets.
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Decorative images described in full
Dividers, corner flourishes and spacer graphics with a sentence attached are noise. An empty alt attribute is the correct answer for those, and it is a real answer, not a shortcut.
What it will not tell you
Stated here rather than discovered later.
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01
Whether the alt text is any good
It can tell you the attribute is there and show you the sentence. Whether the sentence describes the image is a judgement, and no tool makes it honestly.
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02
CSS background images are invisible
An img element is read. A background-image in a stylesheet is not an image as far as this tool is concerned, and not as far as a screen reader is either.
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03
Lazy-loaded images may not appear
If the real source sits in a data attribute until a script swaps it in, the row may show an empty or placeholder src. Static HTML is all that arrives here.
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04
Twenty-five URLs per run
It runs in a browser tab. For an image-heavy site of any size you will want a desktop crawler.
Reasonable questions
What is the difference between a missing alt and an empty one?
A missing attribute means nobody decided. An empty one means somebody decided the image is decorative and assistive technology should skip it. The first is a bug; the second is correct markup, and a tool that reports them as the same thing is unhelpful in both directions.
Does alt text affect SEO or only accessibility?
Both, unevenly. It is a genuine accessibility requirement under WCAG, and it is the main text signal a search engine has for an image. Treat accessibility as the reason and image search as the side effect.
Should every image have alt text?
Every image needs an alt attribute. Not every image needs words inside it. A purely decorative graphic takes an empty one so assistive technology passes over it without comment.
Why is an image missing from the table?
Almost always lazy loading or a script that inserts the image after the page has loaded. This reads the HTML the server sent, and at that moment the image was not in it.
Images are one tab of the checker
The same run returns titles, meta descriptions, headings, word counts, links and structured data as well. It is one tool with seven tables and seven CSV exports, not seven separate tools you have to run one after another.
Other checks the same tool runs: Bulk SEO checker, Meta tag checker, Heading checker, Word count checker, Canonical checker, Open Graph checker, Schema checker