WebAIR

(if yes) Do you indicate that the images are purely decorative and should therefore be ignored by assistive technology? (IMG07)

Why is this important?

If there is no content to convey, then there is no need to provide an alternative text description. Screen readers will then ignore the image and not announce it to the user. Often such decorative images will be declared as a background image in CSS, where an alternative text cannot be provided anyway.

How to fix the problem

Set the alt attribute of a decorative image to null or empty, and this will indicate to assistive technologies that it can be safely ignored. Note that having a "null" alt attribute is not the same as having no alt attribute. Also, make sure that there is no space between the quotation marks of the alt attribute as this can be incorrectly interpreted by some assistive technologies.

 

Alternatively, declare the decorative image as a background image in the CSS.

Example

//The alt attribute is left empty or null to indicate that the image is decorative
<img src="seperator.jpg" alt="">

Further Information

  1. http://html.cita.illinois.edu/text/dec/
  2. http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/