Alt text

Alt text is a short description of what’s in each listing photo. Screen readers read it aloud for visually impaired buyers. Search engines (Etsy’s and Google’s) use it as a small relevance signal, particularly for image search.

What good alt text looks like

• Describe the photo, not the listing. “Cream ceramic mug on a wooden table next to an open book” beats “ceramic mug 11oz handmade gift.”
• Be specific. Color, material, setting, action.
• Don’t keyword-stuff. “Mug, coffee mug, tea cup, ceramic gift” is the wrong shape - read it aloud and it makes no sense.

Per-photo, not per-listing

Each of your 10 photo slots gets its own alt text field. Filling them all is a small but real completeness signal for Etsy’s quality scoring.

Why most sellers skip it

The field is buried - you have to click into each photo individually to add alt text. There’s no bulk editor for it natively. So most listings have empty alt text on every photo, which is both an accessibility loss and a small SEO drag.

At scale

A 200-listing shop with 10 photos each has 2,000 empty alt text fields. Filling them by hand is impractical. Either you build a templated approach (e.g., AI-generated alt text from photo + product context) or you use a bulk tool that lets you set alt text per photo per listing in batches.