A few years ago I was on a project for Tensio and Linea, and Designit organised an accessibility workshop. Not the usual kind where a consultant reads the WCAG checklist out loud, but a room with actual people who use screen readers and other assistive tools every day. The point was for us, the developers, to watch them use the web instead of guessing how they use it.
I went in expecting to hear that I needed to write better alt text. I heard close to the opposite.
Every one of them told me the same thing: they are not interested in alt text. When they land on a site, they are navigating. They jump between headings, they scan landmarks, they tab through links, they look for the thing they came to do. An image with a paragraph of well-meaning alt text is not helpful to that. It is a small obstacle. It is one more thing the screen reader reads out loud before they get to what matters.
That stuck with me, because it contradicts the advice almost every developer repeats without thinking: "always add alt text, it's good for accessibility and good for SEO." I had repeated it too. So I want to be precise about what I actually believe now, because the real answer is more useful than the slogan.
Alt text is not the accessibility win people think it is
The mistake is treating "add alt text" as a single rule. There are really two very different kinds of images on a website, and they need opposite treatment.
Most images on a typical marketing site are decorative. The hero photo, the background texture, the stock image of people pointing at a laptop. These carry no information the page would lose if you removed them. For these, the correct alt text is an empty alt="". That tells the screen reader to skip the image entirely, which is exactly what the people in that workshop wanted. Writing a description for a decorative image does not help anyone. It just adds noise to a navigation experience that is already slower than yours.
The other kind is the informative image: a chart, a diagram, a screenshot of a step in a process, a product photo where the details matter. Here the image is the content. If you strip it out, the page no longer makes sense. These deserve real, specific alt text, because for someone who cannot see the chart, your description is the chart.
The percentage of images on a real client site that fall into that second category is small. So the honest rule is not "always write alt text." It is "skip most of them on purpose, and write genuinely good descriptions for the few that carry meaning." The over-description that the screen reader users complained about comes from developers treating every image as if it were informative.
But alt text is barely an SEO factor, despite what you have read
The other half of the slogan is SEO, and this part is mostly a myth that refuses to die.
Alt text is a confirmed ranking signal for Google Image search, and nothing more. It is not a ranking factor for normal web search. Google's own position is that alt text exists primarily for accessibility, and that it uses the text only as one small signal, alongside computer vision and the surrounding page content, to understand what an image is. The text by itself does not carry meaningful weight in regular search results.
So if you are adding alt text to your hero image hoping it lifts the page in Google, it does not. The only place alt text moves the needle is when image-search traffic actually matters to you, which is mostly e-commerce, recipes, infographics, and how-to content. For a corporate or service site, image search is a rounding error. Stuffing keywords into alt attributes does nothing good and can get the page flagged as spam.
What I actually do now
The rule I settled on after that workshop is simple, and it serves both the screen reader user and the search engine better than the blanket advice does.
Decorative images get an empty alt attribute so assistive tools skip them. Informative images get a clear, specific description written for a human who cannot see them, never for a crawler. I do not write alt text for SEO, because the SEO benefit on the kind of sites I build is close to zero. And I assume that the person relying on the description wants to get past it quickly, so I keep it short and factual rather than flowery.
The instinct to "add alt text everywhere" comes from a good place. But good intentions executed without understanding the actual user create exactly the friction they were meant to remove. The most useful thing that workshop taught me was that accessibility is not a checklist you complete. It is a behaviour you design for, and sometimes the accessible choice is to add nothing at all.
