How to fix role img alt on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. In BigCommerce Admin, go to Storefront → My Themes → click 'Advanced' → 'Edit Theme Files' on your active theme.
2. Use the file search to find role="img" across your Stencil theme's .html and .handlebars template files.
3. Add aria-label="[description]" to each element, following the same pattern as the generic HTML steps.
4. For SVG sprites (common in Stencil), locate the SVG sprite file (often templates/layout/base.html or assets/img/ SVG files), add <title id="unique-id">[Description]</title> as the first child of each <symbol>, and reference it with aria-labelledby on the <svg role="img"> usage site.
5. Push changes and validate with a screen reader or the axe browser extension.

What is role img alt?

When a developer uses the HTML attribute `role="img"` on an element that isn't a native `<img>` tag — for example, an icon font character, an SVG group, a `<div>` containing a decorative graphic, or an emoji used as meaningful content — they are telling browsers and assistive technologies "treat this as an image." However, unlike a real `<img>` tag which has an `alt` attribute, these elements have no built-in place to put a text description. The `aria-label` attribute fills that gap: it provides the invisible text label that a screen reader will read aloud instead of the visual graphic. If `aria-label` (or an equivalent like `aria-labelledby`) is missing or empty, the element is announced to blind or low-vision users as an unlabelled image — or skipped entirely — making it meaningless.

WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.1.1 (Level A — the most basic accessibility level) requires that all non-text content has a text alternative. Failing this criterion means your store is inaccessible to the roughly 7–8 million people in the US alone who use screen readers, exposing you to legal risk under the ADA, Section 508, and equivalent laws in the EU (EAA 2025), UK, Australia, and Canada — accessibility lawsuits against ecommerce stores have increased sharply year-over-year. Beyond legal risk, unlabelled icons and graphics mean blind shoppers cannot understand product badges, trust seals, star ratings rendered as icon fonts, or navigation icons — directly harming conversions and checkout completion rates. Google also uses accessibility signals as part of its overall quality assessment, so a deeply inaccessible site can experience reduced crawl quality over time.

See the complete Role img alt guide for every platform and the full background.