Decorative Image Alt Text in WordPress: Do It Right
Decorative image alt text is the part of accessibility that most guides get backwards. The usual advice is "add alt text to every image", so people dutifully describe the divider lines, background flourishes, and corner swooshes on their WordPress site. That's the wrong move. A decorative image should have empty alt text, so a screen reader skips it entirely.
Get this wrong in either direction and you hurt the people alt text is meant to help. Describe a meaningless swirl and a screen reader user has to sit through "decorative purple swirl graphic" before reaching the actual content. Leave a decorative image with no alt attribute at all and some screen readers read out the file name instead. This post explains how to tell a decorative image from a meaningful one, and how to set empty alt text correctly in WordPress.
What counts as a decorative image
A decorative image adds nothing to the meaning of the page. If you removed it and replaced it with blank space, a reader would lose no information. Common examples on a WordPress site: section divider lines, background textures, corner ornaments, a spacer graphic, an icon sitting next to a text label that already says the same thing.
