Every year, ADA (Title III) web-accessibility lawsuits against US retailers keep climbing, and a huge share of them cite the same root cause: product images with no alt text. If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store, that's usually not a design choice — it's just what happens when a catalog grows to hundreds or thousands of SKUs and nobody goes back to fill in alt attributes.
I wanted to know how exposed a "typical" store actually is, so I built a free scanner and ran it against a handful of real storefronts. Here's what I found, and the tool so you can check your own store in about two minutes.
Why missing alt text is a legal risk, not just an SEO nitpick
Screen readers rely on alt text to describe images to blind and low-vision shoppers. When a product image has no alt, or a generic one like IMG_4021.jpg, a screen reader either skips it or reads the filename — the shopper has no idea what they're looking at, can't tell products apart, and often can't complete checkout.
That's the exact pattern plaintiffs' firms look for before sending a demand letter: it's easy to prove (view source), easy to explain to a judge, and expensive to defend even when the claim doesn't go to trial. Settlements for small-to-mid retailers commonly land in the $5,000–$20,000 range — for something that's a content-population problem, not a code bug.
What the scan actually checks
I built ComplianceSnap to answer one narrow question fast: out of all the product images on your store, how many have no usable alt text?
You paste a store URL, it crawls the product pages, and it reports:
- total product images found
- how many are missing
alt(or have placeholder/filename-only alt) - an estimated risk band based on catalog size and % missing (a 2,000-SKU store at 80% missing is a very different risk profile than a 40-SKU store at 10%)
It's read-only — it doesn't touch your store, theme, or admin, it just reads the public pages the same way a screen reader or a plaintiff's audit tool would.
What I found scanning real stores
Running it against a small sample of public Shopify/WooCommerce stores, the missing-alt rate ranged from under 10% (stores that clearly have an accessibility process) to over 70% (stores where alt text was never part of the product-upload workflow at all). The pattern held regardless of store size — it's a process gap, not a platform limitation. Both Shopify and WooCommerce support alt text natively; almost nobody fills it in by default.
If your scan comes back bad
The scan itself is free and doesn't require an account. If you want the missing alt text actually written (AI-generated, per image, reviewed before you publish), that's a paid step — the free scan is just there so you know whether it's worth doing before you spend anything.
Try it here: https://shop.lumnika.com/compliancesnap/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=ada-alt-text
Curious what other devs/store owners have seen on this — did anyone here actually get an ADA demand letter over image alt text, or is it mostly theoretical risk?
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