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What we need in web pages is a way to mark an image as purely decorative, as recent versions of MS Word have. When so marked, a screen-reader will skip that image as if it doesn't exist. This is a big improvement over the past reality of hearing "Image: decorative bracket" as a document is read. This is what HTML needs.

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> What we need in web pages is a way to mark an image as purely decorative

Setting the alt attribute to an empty string already accomplishes this task. If you find there are cases where it shouldn't, as well as reporting it as a bug to the appropriate browser and/or screen reader vendor, you can use aria-hidden="true" on the img. This is useful e.g. for inline SVGs which don't have an alt attribute.

That's what setting an empty alt text is supposed to do.

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