It’s sometimes argued that providing such images with descriptive alt texts provides too much “noise” for a screen reader user. I mean the vibrant, emotion rich images that provide a website with a sense of atmosphere. There’s no argument that they should always carry an alt text, possibly even a long description. I’m not talking about diagrams, blueprints or other information rich images. But it gets a little more difficult when it comes to more complex images. It’s possible that we can all agree that for minor forms of clipart, a null alt text will do nicely. If you Google for the term “decorative image + alt texts”, you’ll come across countless sites that suggest that a decorative image be given a null alt text. So, you might ask, what’s the problem with this varied point of view? The answer is simple. It includes more content rich images such as photos and artwork. So just what is a decorative image? It seems to me that one person’s eye candy is another person’s emotional link to a website.įor some, decorative images are those horizontal rules, bullets and other forms of minor clipart we find sprinkled around the web. Results from the third WebAIM screen reader survey suggest I'm not alone, so I'm reposting the article here to encourage the debate to continue. Three years later and I still believe that emotion rich images are important to blind people, particularly those who once had sight (and that's most of us). This article was first posted in 2007 on the eAccess blog, now available courtesy of the Internet Archive.
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