The real cost of ignoring alt text
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Nobody bills you for neglecting alt text. The cost shows up somewhere else.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Describe the purpose, not the appearance
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Decorative images should have empty alt attributes. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
What to do next
Never start with "image of". There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
How to tell if yours is fine
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about alt text before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Describe the purpose, not the appearance — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.