alt attribute

What alt attribute means

The defect is absence, and a check that fails on empty alt reports every decorative icon as a fault.

Where alt attribute comes up on this site

• CrawlCheck counted 14 placeholders and none of the 13 photographsThe fourteenth is a genuine inline SVG icon with an empty alt attribute, which is correct markup for decoration.
• Accessibility from the delivered HTML: nine things a screen reader needs before contrast mattersAn alt attribute on every image, where alt="" is correct for decoration and a missing attribute is the defect; the two are not the same and conflating them has produced false findings before .

Related terms in Indexing and discovery

Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.

index coverage · canonical · noindex · X-Robots-Tag · orphan page · E-E-A-T · E-E-A-T proxies · topical authority · Soft 404 · case consistency · accessibility structure · landmark region · accessible name · skip link · main landmark · form control name · duplicate id · IndexNow · faceted navigation · thin content · duplicate content · near-duplicate · boilerplate · MinHash · shingle · dead anchor · placeholder content · image placeholder · alt text · EXIF

Questions about alt attribute

What is alt attribute?

The text alternative on an image. Present and empty marks the image as decorative and is correct; present and descriptive is read aloud; absent entirely makes a screen reader announce the file name.

What does alt attribute not show or guarantee?

Present and empty marks the image as decorative and is correct; present and descriptive is read aloud; absent entirely makes a screen reader announce the file name.

Which area of the glossary does alt attribute belong to?

Indexing and discovery: Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.

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See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.