I'm adding alt
attributes to all my images to improve SEO/screen reader performance.
Per best practice, images that are purely aesthetic should have an empty alt attribute alt=""
so screen readers skip over them. I'm in WordPress and noticed it does add alt
to these descriptionless aesthetic images, but not alt=""
.
Does alt
get read the same as alt=""
by screen readers and search engine crawlers, or should I go in and programatically force an alt=""
?
Yes, it's the same: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#attributes-2
Empty attribute syntax
Just the attribute name. The value is implicitly the empty string.
To me, that says that an attribute with no value is the same as having a value of empty string.
This answer says the same.