In 14 of 15 Industries, Most Small Business Homepages Have Images Screen Readers Can't Describe

A client who is blind opens her accountant's website with a screen reader, software that reads a page aloud, to find the client portal. The portal link is a graphic button with no description, so the screen reader announces "link, image". Across town, a homebuyer using the same software opens a real estate agent's homepage and hears "image" a dozen times as the featured listings load. Neither can tell what the pictures show.

That happens when an image has no alt text, the short description attached to an image for people who cannot see it. Search engines read the same description to understand what an image shows. On a small business homepage, the images carry the proof a customer is looking for: the finished roof, the dining room, the attorney's face, the badge of a professional body. When the description is missing, that proof does not exist for a screen reader user.

The gap is not specific to one trade. In 14 of 15 industries, more than half of small business homepages have at least one image with no alt text, from 53.4% of restaurants to 65.4% of manufacturers. Only auto dealers fall below half. The more images a homepage carries, the more often one is missed, and professional services such as accounting firms trail on the other homepage basics too.

In September 2026 we took businesses listed on US Google Business Profiles in 15 industries, from accounting firms and law firms to roofers, restaurants and SaaS companies, and checked the homepages of their websites. Each industry has between 234 homepages (restaurants) and 809 (HVAC companies). For every homepage we recorded whether any image was missing alt text, how many images the page carried, which platform the site was built on, and four other basics. We compared each industry with 25,708 small business homepages across all industries.

Alt text is the short written description attached to an image in the page code. A homepage misses alt text when at least one of its images has none. A meta description is the summary Google can show under your link in search results. The main headline is the page's H1 heading, the top-level title that screen readers and search engines use to understand what the page is about. A favicon is the small icon shown in the browser tab, and a title tag is too long when it runs past the length Google shows in full. The median is the middle homepage: half carry more images, half fewer.

Across the 15 industries, the share of homepages with an undescribed image runs from 42.9% for auto dealers to 65.4% for manufacturers, and the average across all small business homepages is 60.1%. Five industries sit above that average, and the top of the table is a cluster of professional services: financial advisors at 64.2%, insurance agencies at 61.3% and accounting firms at 60.9%. These homepages lean on staff headshots, carrier and association logos and explanatory graphics, and each is one more field someone has to fill in.

Two results stand out. SaaS companies, which build software for a living and have more resources than a typical local business, leave images undescribed at 60%, level with roofers and accountants. And roofing is the only home service trade in the top five, well above plumbing (53.8%) and HVAC (54%); roofing homepages lean on project galleries and before-and-after photos.

At the bottom, auto dealers miss alt text about 17 points less often than the average small business homepage. That fits vehicle photos described automatically from inventory feeds: a template that writes the vehicle name into every image description covers hundreds of photos without anyone typing a word. Restaurants, at 53.4%, are the next-best industry, and still more than half of their homepages have the gap.

The number of images on a page is the clearest pattern in the data. Among real estate homepages with 1 to 5 images, 38% miss alt text somewhere; among those with more than 15, 89% do, a 51-point gap. Featured listings refresh constantly, and each new photo arrives without a description unless someone adds one. Accounting firms show the same curve from a higher starting point: 55.3% of lean accounting homepages and 85% of image-heavy ones leave an image undescribed.

Every image added to a page is another chance to skip the description field, and the images that pile up fastest are the ones added in batches: before-and-after galleries on dental homepages, rows of carrier logos on insurance homepages, coupon graphics and brand logos on HVAC homepages, food galleries on restaurant homepages. A carrier logo row can hold ten or more images at once, and each logo needs the carrier name as its description. Text inside an image, such as a seasonal discount or a banner with opening hours, needs to be repeated in the description, or the information is invisible to anyone using a screen reader.

Auto dealers are the one reversal. The median dealer homepage has 20 images, more than any other industry, yet 45.9% of dealer homepages with more than 15 images miss alt text, against 52.3% of those with 1 to 5. That fits image-heavy dealer pages being filled from inventory feeds that write descriptions automatically, while lighter pages are built and updated by hand and behave like the rest of small business.

WordPress is the most common platform in every one of the 15 industries, running from 12.5% of auto dealer websites to 50.7% of law firm websites. In 13 of the 15 industries, WordPress homepages miss alt text more often than the same industry's homepages on other platforms. Dental practices and insurance agencies are the exceptions, where WordPress homepages do slightly better.

The platform does not write alt text; whoever uploads the images does. Every major platform has a field for image descriptions. What differs from site to site is whether the person adding an image fills it in, and page builder widgets, sliders, gallery plugins and logo carousels often place that field a click or two away from the upload, where it is easy to miss. WordPress sites are often assembled by a designer and then updated by staff, so new images go up long after anyone last checked the descriptions.

The widest gap is among auto dealers: 84.2% of WordPress dealer homepages miss alt text, more than twice the 37% of dealer homepages on other platforms. A dealer that manages its own WordPress site usually has no inventory feed filling in descriptions, so every banner and photo depends on someone remembering the field. SaaS companies show the next-widest gap, 74.5% against 51.8%, as page builder sections add logo strips and icon grids.

Alt text is one of several homepage basics that decide how a page reads to assistive technology and how it appears in Google. Accounting firm homepages have the highest rate of missing main headlines and missing meta descriptions of the 15 industries, and 24.5% have no favicon, against 15.2% on average. Together these point to homepages set up once and rarely revisited.

The trades do best on headlines: 15.2% of roofing homepages and 15.8% of dental homepages have no main headline, about half the 29.8% average. That makes their image gap stand out; a business that has taken care of its headings and search summaries has usually left the images for last. SaaS homepages have the fewest overlong titles at 10.9%, while 35.6% of auto dealer homepages have a title too long to show in full on Google, nearly twice the 19.1% average, often because the template packs the dealership name, brands and city into one line. Medical practices have the fewest missing favicons at 10.9%.

Open your homepage editor and click each image. Every major platform has an alt text or image description field. Start with the images your industry adds in batches: galleries, sliders, logo rows, staff headshots and any image used as a button or link. An image that works as a link needs a description that says where it goes, such as "client portal login", not what it looks like. An image that holds text, such as a coupon or opening hours, needs that text in its description.

Then make the description part of publishing, not a clean-up job. Whoever adds images to the site, whether a staff member or an outside agency, should fill in the field before saving, and purely decorative images such as background patterns should be marked as decorative so screen readers skip them. Recheck the homepage each time a gallery, listing feed or logo row changes, because those are the images most often left blank. Fix a missing meta description and main headline while you are in the editor.

If your homepage carries more than 15 images, or you run WordPress with page builder sections, a website accessibility consultant can review the whole site in one pass, from images and headings to portal links and forms, and give your team a prioritized list of fixes.

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