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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

I think you might be talking about images that have no alt attribute at all. My understanding about present but empty alt tags is different:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/

https://web.dev/image-alt/#how-to-add-alternative-text-to-im...

https://yoast.com/image-seo-alt-tag-and-title-tag-optimizati...

As far as I understand it, screen readers should skip over the image with an empty alt attribute because it's like a page in a document saying "page deliberately left blank". Unlike no alt attribute in which no intention can be inferred and which screen readers do read (as far as I know they read the URL), an empty alt attribute is deliberately saying "ignore this image". Not being blind or partially-sighted I'm not sure whether this is the case in all screen readers, or whether theory is different than practice.

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You are right. It seems screen readers these days do skip over images with empty alt tags.

I don't use one myself and have most of my knowledge from friends that do, but this info is obviously outdated.

Rereading my comment I see that I only said "empty alt attribute" at the beginning and then started saying "no alt text", which is much more ambiguous and easy to misinterpret.

<rant> The thread till here is a perfect example of how discussions/debates should be like on the web. Someone expressed an opinion, someone else expressed an opposing opinion (misinterpreting the first opinion). Both opinions, if interpreted correctly, are valid, and the person who misinterpreted admitted it. Beyond that, (and note this) the author of the original opinion also apologized for being confusing in his statement of his opinion. Well done! </rant>

That's more of a <appreciation>

There's no such thing as an alt tag, you're mixing up tags with attributes.

Screen readers have skipped over empty alt attributes for decades. I'm not certain they ever behaved differently, but if there were a time when empty alt attributes caused problems, it was back in the 90s. Best practice for purely decorative images has been to use empty alt attributes for 20+ years.

>but if there were a time when empty alt attributes caused problems, it was back in the 90s.

Maybe my memory is off but I think up until the middle of the first decade of this century empty alt text was not good for screen readers, although maybe that was just because you always have to take into account older screen readers still in use.

I was paying attention to this stuff by the turn of the century and best practice back then was the same as it is now. Screen readers have come a long way, but they could handle empty alt attributes correctly back then as well. I just checked, and the HTML 4 specification has been advising people to use empty alt attributes in this situation since 1997.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/struct/includes.html#...

Yeah, I meant to write attribute of course.

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