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Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

> 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.

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

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