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Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. Empty alt text means no image description. Think about that. You are blind. Your Screen reader tells you "image", nothing more.

How are you to know if this image is purely decorational or if the author just didn't include any alt text, like happens so often?

Also, don't think of the alt text as part of the surrounding text. Think of it as many browsers would display it, a box with a broken image icon with the alt text besides it. Would you not wonder what would have been displayed there if the image would work?

And do images that are just for decoration really need to be images? Can they not be for example background images in other elements? Like styling an hr element for a visual divider instead of using just a divider image?

But in any case, provide some alt text! If it just says "divider", "logo" or "decoration", that is still better than nothing for someone who can't see it at all.

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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.

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I don't use one myself and have most of my knowledge from friends that do, but this info is obviously outdated.

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.

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>

> But in any case, provide some alt text! If it just says "divider", "logo" or "decoration", that is still better than nothing for someone who can't see it at all.

This is a generalisation and one that many screen reader users wouldn't agree with. People who can only read through audio or braille are already facing certain disadvantages, such as not being able to quickly scan a piece of content in the same way visual readers can. Polluting the content with meaningless alternative text makes for an overly verbose user experience.

> Empty alt text means no image description. Think about that. You are blind. Your Screen reader tells you "image", nothing more.

This is factually incorrect. Using an empty string as the alt attribute on an image is the correct way to mark an image as decorative, and as such a screen reader user will never be informed about its presence. If the alt attribute is omitted entirely, that's when screen readers try to guess by announcing the filename and/or URL (or on iOS, actually trying to perform object recognition on its contents).

It should be that alt="" means the author specified that the image is purely decorational, missing alt means the author did not specify anything. Do screen readers really say "image" when presented with alt=""?

They used to. But your comment made me search a bit and it seems most don't any more, you have to turn that on.

I guess you can then use alt="" for "decorational" images and practically hide them from screen readers? It still seems odd to me though to even have these kind of images.

My view is that most images are decorational in the terms that we're talking about. You can view a photo of a burst dam, to take one of my examples, but a description of the scene should be in the article already, and therefore any further description is superfluous. The "should" in that sentence is doing a lot of work though - I don't think people consider this kind of stuff much at all, not on a deep level about why they're doing things. My first proper web job was in the BBC in the late 90s, and it was a really steep learning curve but has stood me in really good stead when considering this kind of stuff.

I have trouble wrapping my head around this. When I think of decorational images, it's mostly back to times when we used spacers or built table layouts with sliced images. I drank the semantic cool aid. Decoration should be separate from content.

Of course a stock image in an article is not really important and may not add much value, but someone thought including it did add some at least. It just seems weird then to say that screen reader users should never even be made aware that it is there.

Obviously from all the comments, this seems to be what people do. Still, it seems somehow wrong to me. If the image sets tone, should we not try to convey that? If it really serves no purpose, should we not just leave it out at all?

> back to times when we used spacers or built table layouts with sliced images

Haha! Someone of roughly my own vintage I see...

I get what you're saying, but perhaps if you think about it in terms of sensory modalities it might help. There are images which convey a feeling purely through its aesthetic that are ruined to the point of uselessness by plain description in written language, a bit like having to explain a joke: "You see, the expectation is that the chicken crossing the road is going to be for a funny reason, like a pun, or something, but having set up that expectation the fact that you've subverted the expectation makes it funny."

Another good example might be the story in this This American Life episode of the guy who sees a colour that is indescribable: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/577/something-only-i-can-se...

Better not to interrupt the reading flow just to let someone know there's something there, the purpose of which you can't really describe in any meaningful way.

The issue here is that despite screen readers, text is simply not the same as images.

Spamming a page with redundant visual imagery that's easy to take in at a glance is fine. But its terrible to screen read, because reading is much more expensive than glancing. For the alt text, it's important to only give valuable non-redundant information.

> Of course a stock image in an article is not really important and may not add much value

Not sure if anybody has mentioned this, but a super common case is that stock and other images (photos especially) require attribution. Working in the digital accessibility space, I see a huge number of examples of an image being marked as decorative (or worse, being implemented as a background image in the CSS) with an inline credit line. So as a screen reader user, I'm reading an article and keep spotting these notices all over the place, with no hint of what they accompany. In those cases, the image must have a description, even if it is thought that it doesn't add value.

The only purpose for those images is eye candy, something to make the article "prettier" and prevent a wall of text from forming.

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

How do you know the alt text is an accurate description of the image?

> I strongly disagree. Empty alt text means no image description. Think about that. You are blind. Your Screen reader tells you "image", nothing more.

I feel like this is something where AI can actually shine: generating descriptions of images and video for blind people.

Best of all it's already a solved problem (and others have thought about it already): https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/g...

The next step is using AI to describe (important) changes to pages. Think of a chat on a website with new messages appearing. A voice saying: "Alice writes 'hello'" goes a long way. Thinking of it there really ought to be a way for JavaScript to interact with screen readers, allowing developers to give changes performed by JS something like an alt text.

The final step would be using AI to make interacting with sites easier. Finding the right button/element to click/focus can be really annoying with a screen reader. If you could just tell the AI "fill the form with X and Y and click submit", or "go to the next page", and possibly having that work even if what you're looking is buried in some context menu, pretty much any non-accessible page becomes accessible.

> I feel like this is something where AI can actually shine: generating descriptions of images and video for blind people.

That's exactly what you don't want in the majority of cases. The alt attribute is for an alternative to the image, not a description of the image. For decorative images, the alternative is the empty string, no matter what the image contains. "Laughing group of people" might be a correct description of a stock image, but completely wrong as alt text. For, e.g. a red arrow pointing out a required field, the alternative is "Required", not "Red arrow pointing right".

I think it might already be there - I just right clicked in Chrome to see what options I could pull up for an image, and noticed a "Get image descriptions from Google" option

I wouldn't consider generating descriptions a "solved problem". There has been progress with AI, but part of the issue is that image classifiers are trained to describe the objects in the image, but not necessarily the feeling or meaning of the image.

If you have Instagram, scroll through the alt text on the images some time. You'll see descriptions like "May contain: Person standing outside". That may be an accurate description of the picture, but it may be a poor substitute for what a sighted person sees -- someone showing off their new sweater, or posing in front of an interesting wall, or an aesthetic splash of colours. Of course, maybe someone who is fully blind doesn't care too much about a splash of colours, but the point is that describing an image is more than just about identifying the individual objects visible in the image. Because when we see a picture of an adorable puppy, we get more out of that image than just "dog sitting on floor". As of now, human-generated alt text is still the best solution in most cases, even if we are definitely making progress with AI. It's hard enough for humans to describe the aesthetics of an image, let alone a machine.

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