alt="" should not be reported as missing alt text
Will Hankinson
When an image (especially icons) is for decorative purposes only or it already has a text equivalent, the W3C recommends using an empty alt tag to hide the image from screen readers. These should not be reported as missing alt tags.
Mathias L
I totally agree, an empty alt attribute is not an issue e.g. for decorative images. So the Site Report should only report images where the alt attribute is totally missing.
For decorative images as well as for statistical images/pixels: there is no need to provide an alt value for screen readers etc - in this case alt="" is valid. W3C is absolutely correct: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/
A
Amelia Jones
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Matt T
Ideally this should also look for the role="presentation" attribute.
If role="presentation" is present on an image tag, AHREFs should ignore images with missing or empty alt tags
As detailed here:
And here:
It's worth noting that SEMRush does obey these conditions
M
Mark Singer
Thanks for creating this thread Will Hankinson. I have a client who's Pinterest Tracking Pixel is popping up as missing an alt tag. Of course, this should be null because a completed alt text tag for this would be irrelevant and bothersome for someone using a screen reader. And irrelevant for SEO.
The result is that there are almost 1000 missing alt-text warnings on my clients report. Which I will have explain to them is an issue with Ahrefs reporting, and something they should disregard.
Hopefully the Ahrefs team will consider how to implement this reporting in a better way in the future. I personally like the idea Kieran Thomas proposed. Separate reports for missing alt attributes and null attributes. Maybe null reports should be a notice, not a warning?Seems to make sense to me, but curious about other possible solutions as well.
Olivier Tassinari
Yes, please! Without this, it's unusable.
K
Kieran Thomas
Totally agree. It would be good if Ahrefs could filter/run 2 separate reports:
1 for missing alt
attributes
, and 1 for missing/null alt attribute
values
Rowan Collins
Agreed, an empty alt attribute is correct according to accessibility guidelines, these are not being correctly identified as optimised.
Jake Sebastian-Jones
Totally agree. An empty attribute is different to a missing attribute. Th warning should only be for MISSING alt attribute.