Decorative Images Hidden

The starting point is ericwbailey's framing in #238 that an abled content author deciding what counts as decorative removes agency from the person using assistive technology, with a case he met in the wild (photos of amenities for luxury housing classed as decorative even though they communicate the benefit of living there); ericwbailey himself did not call for abolition, and suggested tempering the point by testing with the intended audience. brett-oppegaard goes further in #369 — a designer told him a stock photo of a diverse group reading books in front of a university building was decorative and therefore not legally required to be described, and he has heard the same claim made about portrait photos of organizational leaders. His argument is that visual designers always have the option not to include an image, so every included image has a rhetorical purpose; that a screen reader user can skip alt text with a single keypress, so the audience should decide, not millions of decentralized, busy, often untrained site managers; and that the loophole is why Instagram alone emits 70,000 mostly undescribed images a minute. He also wants the term "alt text" retired in favour of static Audio Description, which he argues separately in #371 (see image-alternatives-available). charleshalldesign takes the same line in #878, proposing to retire the concept completely on the grounds that all images convey information, and that an image next to text, in a control or not, supplements the text rather than duplicating it.

TestPartners reports content creators over-compensating with literal descriptions of decorative images running to several sentences and as much as 50 words, which a screen reader user must sit through a large proportion of before concluding it is fluff they did not need; he puts community opinion at roughly 50:50 and says a substantial majority should exist before anything changes. He half-seriously proposed a CSS prefers-reduced-fluff property as the only way to satisfy both camps, and rejects the premise that undescribed decorative images discriminate — you may as well argue that hanging wallpaper discriminates against people who cannot see it. patrickhlauke's reductio in #238 is that if every non-text piece of information must be conveyed, authors would have to describe colour and sizing choices and ultimately the entire CSS of the page, so a pragmatic and admittedly subjective cut-off is unavoidable; he adds that where a flourish exists to convey a mood, prose carrying the same tone can already be an acceptable alternative. bruce-usab makes the placement argument against Myndex's paisley example: the fact that paisley patterns descend from Jacquard-loom punch cards is compelling trivia that belongs in the footer or on an About page available to everyone, not buried in an alt attribute forced only on screen reader users.

yatil's objection in #369 is that WCAG has said "pure decoration" since 2008 and merely being decorative never qualified for the exception — WCAG comes from the era of image-rendered container shadows and image-replacement headings, and most genuinely pure decoration can now be done in CSS. He argues the draft's test, whether removing the image would impact how people understand the page, is far too low a bar: under it a portrait in a staff index is decorative and so is a news article photo, and neither "impact" nor "understand" is defined. lauracarlson opened #238 on the narrower charge that "Decorative Images" is broader than "Pure Decoration" and that conflating them is a mistake; her specific target is the Method's "Illustrative of adjacent text but not contributing information (eye-candy)" line, and she proposed renaming "Decorative" to "Purely Decorative" throughout. She calls null alt a hangover from the spacer-gif era; bruce-usab agrees null alt is overused, though he says his own sampling shows missing alt and low-information alt attempted as textual equivalence remain the bigger problems, while allowing this may be sampling bias. In #878 yatil asks the group to stick to WCAG 2's pure decoration definition, since both standards will be used in parallel for years, and says the linked-card examples raised there fall under the Controls, Input exception instead.

MakotoUeki opened #466 proposing an explicit split: purely decorative images (an icon alongside text, a thumbnail inside a link) need no text alternative and should have no accessible name, while decorative images (a photo, an illustration) may usefully carry one as a best practice. The user need he cites is a person who lost their sight later in life and wants the description in order to picture the image, and his position in #238 is that the user, not the author, should decide whether something is meaningless. fstrr points at a ready-made middle category: the HTML spec's ancillary images, where an image is neither purely decorative nor entirely redundant with the text, the alt attribute must be present, its value may be the empty string or a textual representation, and it must not be empty when the image has a caption.

grace-snow's reply in #466 is that if an image adds meaning it is not decorative at all, so naming a class of "decorative" images that do need alternative text is highly likely to confuse; whether a photo or illustration is decorative depends on the surrounding content and context, not on the image type. Finnberrys agrees and offers the substitution test she applies: a swirly line at the bottom of a page could be swapped for a wiggly rainbow line with no effect on content, whereas a photo of her dog on a page about assistance dogs could not be swapped for a unicorn without becoming confusing and weird. sydneycolemanfromgoogle filed the same objection independently in #518 — the distinction is not useful without a clear and mostly objective means of telling the two apart.

mraccess77 reports that Internet Explorer's exposure of alt as a tooltip let him learn things about images he could not distinguish visually — essentially audio description for the web, the nuances low-vision users miss — and notes that captions today are available to everyone rather than only to deaf users, while accessible name and description are not. Myndex makes the adoption argument: alt text is effectively unreachable outside screen reader use, and if it surfaced through a standard user-agent affordance it would serve people with prosopagnosia or other cognitive and contextual needs, reader mode, and failed image loads, and the broader demand would drive adoption. bruce-usab counters from history that IE's tooltip behaviour is precisely what trained authors to write tooltips into alt for years, that the TITLE attribute only partly separated them, and that the practice only corrected when touch UIs removed the tooltip, though after mraccess77's reply he allowed he was probably overstating the harm and that some human-written alt is almost always better than none. Myndex also flags that CSS background images accept no alt text at all, which he treats as a missing platform property rather than an author failing.

#878, opened by alastc on 2026-09-29 after vavroom's article on retiring decorative images, is where the definition argument now runs. alastc floated redefining it as not contributing to the information, functionality, meaning, mood or context, then asked whether not relied on would be better after patrickhlauke noted that mood can also be carried by the tone of the text. lauracarlson revived her purely decorative proposal, with a definition excluding anything that provides meaning, context, mood or user understanding, and with alastc reframed generic card images and linked thumbnails as duplicative rather than decorative. MakotoUeki, facilitating the subgroup, said it will not stick to WCAG 2's definitions and wants to gather concrete examples. On verbosity, alastc reports screen reader users split between wanting descriptions and wanting to get on with the task; patrickhlauke warns that requiring alternatives for most images will produce LLM-generated descriptions and distinguishes an alternative from an on-demand description; mraccess77 argues that alt on every image without importance metadata, such as an aria-important attribute, would leave users no way to control verbosity, and cites invisible email tracking images as genuinely ignorable. LJWatson and vavroom answer that content that is present can be skipped while absent content cannot.