Alt text is the description a screen reader reads out loud instead of showing a picture. It also does a small, real job for SEO: Google Images uses it to figure out what a photo shows. Most people building a website never think about it once. Worth five minutes, though, because where that text comes from on a Cantrip site is not always what you'd guess.
Take the Photo Grid section. Add a photo, and the field underneath it is labeled "Title," with placeholder text telling you it's for "organization only." Sounds like a private note, something Cantrip uses to keep your media library sorted and nothing a visitor ever sees. That's not what happens. Whatever you type there becomes the image's alt attribute, word for word. A screen reader reads it out loud. Google's crawler reads it too. The one place Cantrip tells you nobody sees this field is the one place it's wrong.
The same pattern shows up elsewhere, just with a different borrowed field. Large Photo pulls its alt text from the Caption field. Service Block pulls it from the service's own title. The Gallery section's code even checks for a dedicated alt field first, but that field doesn't exist anywhere in the editor, so it falls straight through to the same title field Photo Grid uses. None of these were built as alt-text fields. They just happen to be the only text sitting next to the image, so that's what ended up in the alt attribute.
The fix is simple once you know it: type a real description, not a label. "Title" on a Photo Grid image isn't asking what the photo is called in your head. It's asking what a blind visitor needs to know about it. "Storefront exterior at dusk" does real work. "IMG047" or "Home page pic 2" does nothing for anyone.
Here's the part worth being straight about. Three sections, Collection Card, Collection Teaser, and Content Block, don't write an alt attribute at all right now. No borrowed field, no fallback, nothing. If your homepage or a collection listing leans on one of those for its main photo, that image is invisible to a screen reader today. Not described poorly. Just not described.
Banner is a different case, not a gap. A banner photo renders as a CSS background image on a div, not an img tag, so there's no alt attribute mechanism to begin with. That's a common pattern for hero backgrounds across most page builders, not a Cantrip-specific miss, and it's usually fine since a banner sits behind text that's already readable on its own.
None of this is going to sink a website. Most visitors, sighted or not, judge a small business site on whether they can find your hours and your phone number, and that still matters more. But if someone using a screen reader is trying to picture your shop before they walk in, or Google's just trying to understand your gallery, the difference between a real description and an empty attribute is everything for that one image. Fill in the fields that exist honestly. The three sections that don't have one yet are on our list, not something you can work around today.