Alt text is accessibility, SEO and resilience. It should not wait until a crawler complains.
Richard Moore5 min read
The easy version of image alt text is to treat it as a detail you can tidy up later.
That is usually how launch risk survives. The product looks good enough in the builder, the demo path works, and the team moves on to the announcement, the campaign, the investor email or the client handoff. The problem is that public visitors do not experience the site as a project plan. They experience the page in front of them, on their device, with their expectations, at the exact moment they are deciding whether to trust you.
PageLens AI exists for that moment. A scan gives you evidence before the public does. It shows the page, the finding, the severity, the screenshot where useful, and the practical next step. It is not trying to replace taste, strategy or engineering judgment. It is trying to make sure the obvious launch-readiness issues are visible while there is still time to fix them.
The risk hiding in plain sight
The awkward thing about image alt text is that it rarely announces itself during a happy-path demo. A founder sees the flow they meant to build. An agency sees the polished design. A product team sees the sprint that finally got over the line. A coding agent sees that the requested component compiles.
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A stranger sees something else. They see the missing trust cue, the slow first load, the confusing label, the broken social preview, the weak page title, the exposed route, the vague answer, or the form that feels slightly unsafe. They do not know which parts were generated by AI, rushed for a deadline or scheduled for the next sprint. They only know whether the product feels ready.
That is why PageLens AI accessibility checks matters. It gives the team a second perspective: not another opinion in a meeting, but a repeatable check against the live site. The useful output is not a dramatic score. The useful output is a ranked list of specific things that would make the site feel more trustworthy, more usable and more understandable.
What to check first
Start with the pages that carry the most public risk. For most teams, that means the homepage, pricing page, signup flow, contact form, docs entry point, product page and any authenticated screen that a customer sees soon after purchase.
Then look for the issues that compound. A weak title is not just an SEO problem if it also makes the browser tab unclear and the social card vague. A missing label is not just an accessibility issue if it also makes the form harder to complete. A heavy hero image is not just a performance issue if it burns the first five seconds of a paid campaign click. A missing security header is not just a scanner warning if it makes a technical buyer wonder what else was skipped.
In PageLens AI, the fastest way through that work is to review meaningful images. Do not try to fix everything in one heroic pass. Treat the report as a queue. Start with high-severity findings and quick wins. Accept tradeoffs deliberately. Re-scan when the meaningful fixes are live.
Where agents help
This is also where AI agents become more useful. A vague prompt like "make the site better" invites broad advice. A PageLens AI report gives the agent structure: URLs, evidence, category, severity, screenshots, suggested fixes and Markdown that can be pasted into Claude, Cursor or Codex.
A better prompt is:
"Use this PageLens AI finding as the source of truth. Explain the likely cause, propose the smallest safe fix, and ask before changing auth, payment, analytics or data access behavior."
That instruction works because the report has already done the triage. The agent is not inventing a launch checklist from memory. It is working from the same evidence the human reviewer can inspect.
For MCP-connected workflows, the handoff gets even cleaner. Instead of copying a Markdown export, the assistant can query the scan, list findings, pull quick wins and keep the repair conversation inside the tool where the work happens. That is the promise behind "have your agent speak to my agent": the audit should be context your assistant can use, not a PDF you forget in downloads.
The practical habit
The habit is simple: scan before the link gets attention.
Scan before the Product Hunt launch. Scan before the founder starts outreach. Scan before the agency handoff. Scan before turning on paid traffic. Scan before asking an AI agent to refactor a page it has never seen running in production.
The point is not perfection. The point is to write alt text that supports the page. A launch-ready site can still have a backlog. It should not have avoidable issues that make users question whether the team is paying attention.
That is the core PageLens AI bet: small accessibility details shape trust.
If the site is worth sharing, it is worth checking. If the report finds nothing meaningful, brilliant. If it finds a handful of practical fixes, even better. You just bought down public risk before the public had to tell you about it.