Accessibility lawsuits are climbing, and a screen reader is the test your images face

UsableNet, a company that sells accessibility testing, projects about 6,176 digital accessibility lawsuits in 2026, based on filings recorded through June 14. That would be nearly 20% more than 2025. It is a projection from a vendor, so treat the exact figure loosely. The direction is the part worth noticing.

The practical takeaway for a marketing team is simple. In that same analysis, the question that matters is whether a real person using a screen reader can navigate and use the site. For an image, that comes down to one thing: does it have a text alternative (alt text, an image description, an alt tag, whatever your team calls it) that does the same job as the picture?

Why images are where this gets concrete

Most accessibility problems take a developer to fix. A missing image description does not. It is also the kind of gap anyone can find: the W3C’s Non-text Content criterion is Level A, the most basic tier of WCAG, and it asks that non-text content have a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose. If you are fuzzy on how WCAG, the ADA, and the European law fit together, the plain-English rundown of accessibility laws is the place to start. None of this is legal advice.

Missing is common, and so is useless

The latest WebAIM scan, run in February 2026, found that 53.1% of home pages had images with no alternative text, and 16.2% of all home page images were missing it. We took that apart in our look at the WebAIM numbers, including the quieter problem of descriptions that exist but say nothing.

The first version is not description at all. The second tells a screen reader user what a sighted reader gets from the chart. If you want to hear the difference, our walkthrough of how screen readers announce images plays out both cases.

What to do this week

You do not need a legal team to take a first pass. Start with the images people see most: the homepage, the pinned posts, the campaign you are running right now. Give each a sentence that says what it shows and why it is there. Decorative images get nothing, and that is correct.

Then deal with the backlog. A year of old posts is a bigger job, but it shrinks fast once you sort by reach, and this guide to auditing a year of past posts shows how. From here on, write the description at the moment you pick the image. With SnipAlt that is a snip with Ctrl+Shift+A (⌘⇧A on a Mac), a quick edit, and paste.

Lawsuit counts will keep moving, and the projections will keep changing. The images in your next post will not wait for them.