Alt text is one of the rare pieces of on-page markup that serves two completely different audiences equally well: it's what a screen reader announces in place of an image, and it's also the primary text signal search engines use to understand and rank an image in image search.
Missing entirely is worse than imperfect
An <img> tag with no alt attribute at all forces a screen reader to fall back to announcing the filename, which is rarely meaningful ("IMG_4821.jpg" tells a listener nothing). Even an imperfect but descriptive alt attribute is a meaningful improvement over none.
Empty alt text is sometimes the correct answer
For purely decorative images — a background flourish, a spacer, an icon that's already explained by adjacent text — an empty alt="" attribute is the correct, deliberate choice, telling a screen reader to skip the image entirely rather than announce something meaningless. The problem is only when that pattern is used broadly across genuinely informative images, not decorative ones.
TeckForge's Image Alt Text Checker scans a page's HTML and flags every image with a missing alt attribute versus an intentionally empty one, so you can tell the difference between "forgotten" and "deliberate" across a whole page at once.
