Decorative images

Purely decorative images, such as spacer gifs or box corners, which have no meaning to the page content should have a null alt attribute.

It is considered best practice to code decorative images as part of the background using the style sheet.

Some spacer graphics do have a semantic meaning these should have an alt attribute of alt=" ". For example consider two links separated by a small spacer image, the spacer graphic should have an alt attribute of alt=" ".

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Bullets

Images used to represent bullets should have a representational alt attribute such as alt=".", alt="*" or alt="#".

Best practice would use the style sheet to replace a standard bullet with a graphic image.

	Tables are often used for layout
	this list is laid out using a table comprising of 2 columns
	in this circumstance the bullet image should have alt="." or alt="#"
	changing the bullet at a later date would mean changing every occurrence of the image
	this method involves lots of code and clutter.

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Horizontal rules

An image intended to act as a divider or rule between parts of a document should have a representational alt attribute such as alt="---" or alt="___".

Best practice would use a hr element and change its appearance via the style sheet. Less code, less clutter, easy to change and no alt attribute required.

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The code would look like this:

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Pragmatic approach

While the above is semantically correct, it is adding unnecessary noise to a screen reader. So from a pragmatic viewpoint it is suggested that null alt text may be most beneficial.

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