ALT IMG ATTRIBUTE
The ALT IMG Attribute is part of the <IMAGE> tag and - according to the WorldWideWebConsortium (W3C), which is responsible for writing the specifications for HTML - is "for user agents that cannot display images, forms, or applets, this attribute specifies alternate text"(Source).
In using the ALT IMG attribute, the W3C advises:
While alternate text may be very helpful, it must be handled with care. Authors should observe the following guidelines:
Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images intended to format a page, for instance, alt="red ball" would be inappropriate for an image that adds a red ball for decorating a heading or paragraph. In such cases, the alternate text should be the empty string (""). Authors are in any case advised to avoid using images to format pages; style sheets should be used instead.
Do not specify meaningless alternate text (e.g., "dummy text"). Not only will this frustrate users, it will slow down user agents that must convert text to speech or braille output (ibid).
Do not specify meaningless alternate text (e.g., "dummy text"). Not only will this frustrate users, it will slow down user agents that must convert text to speech or braille output (ibid).
Search engines tend to take the text of this attribute into consideration in their SearchEngineAlgorithms when determining a page's relevancy for various search queries.
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