If you have to apply CSS to find elements with inline styles, I think you have a more serious problem.
And telling everyone that every one of their images must have an alt tag is draconian. Sometimes an image is purely decorative. Sometimes an image doesn't convey any more than the paragraph beside it. Often an alt tag is written in a perfunctory way, or even when it isn't, it doesn't truly make things better for the blind person. I think they should be at the writer's discretion.
Your comment is actively harmful. You are spouting off a strong opinion that hasn't benefitted from any actual knowledge of the topic — or from actually reading the article — or from thinking about it for a more than a second.
As the article correctly states, an alt attribute should always be present; explicitly empty values signal that no alt content is needed for a screen reader.
I think it's smart that alt is required. Many of us would otherwise blithely continue on without considering accessibility. (Sadly, most of us still do, and we build tools and abstractions that "automatically" set the alt to something, be it an empty string or the file name… defeating the purpose of inviting the author to explicitly create an alt content.)
Back to your comment - if you are of the habit of shitting on ideas just to provoke a defense of them in order to ultimately learn something, I suggest you find a more constructive approach to learning… you could have googled it for 15 seconds and could have instead written, “I thought making a rule of always including alt was dumb, but I googled it and discovered that it's required by the HTML standard because x, y, and z”
> You are spouting off a strong opinion that hasn't benefitted
> from any actual knowledge of the topic
> or from thinking about it for a more than a second.
I made my first website in the late '90s and have been doing web apps for a living for over a decade. I have thought about it quite a bit over the years, and I have been on both sides of the issue.
> just to provoke a defense
I was not looking for a defense. I was trying to help others not feel guilty for not doing something that I think seldom makes a real difference. I'm thinking of most of the articles I have read, and I'm thinking of the difference to a screen reader in either case: (1) stopping to read some alt text or (2) simply silently skipping over it and just reading the article. In many cases I think it's best not to break the flow or waste the person's time.
> An image without the alt attribute is not even valid HTML.
The spec says it is for a few cases (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/embedded-content.html...). But yes, for the case I'm thinking of it insists we explicitly put alt="". I think this is tedious and overstepping its bounds. If a writer doesn't want to put alt text for one of his images, he shouldn't have to. He chose to write an article instead of doing nothing.
And I'm not really talking about being lazy. I'm talking about not wasting the reader's time. If you tell everyone it's better to put an alt tag than nothing at all, then you're going to get a lot of poorly written and annoyingly redundant alt text. If someone writes a text-based article, then it is handicap-accessible, with or without alt tags. What might be less accessible would be an article typeset with images (which is rare nowadays anyways) --- but even then, computers are so good now at deciphering images that even that might not be much of a problem either.
According to TFA, an image with no alt tag will cause some screenreaders to read the src, so a purely decorative image should instead have a null alt tag.
This makes some sense, but it occurs to me that a blind person has no way to distinguish between an image that has no alt tag because it would be meaningless, and an important image that the author simply didn't think to write an alt tag for.
alt="(Decoration)" would clear it right up and only takes a few seconds.
I like using these to diagnose what kind of lemon a client just brought for maintenance, but they can be pretty nice to ensure you got your final product right too.
And telling everyone that every one of their images must have an alt tag is draconian. Sometimes an image is purely decorative. Sometimes an image doesn't convey any more than the paragraph beside it. Often an alt tag is written in a perfunctory way, or even when it isn't, it doesn't truly make things better for the blind person. I think they should be at the writer's discretion.