Decorative images, empty alt: Crawl Audit check 172

Short answer: some images are there only for looks, like a background flourish or an icon next to text that already says the same thing. Those should have an empty alt (alt="") so screen readers skip them. Check 172 is informational and always passes: it reports how many images are marked as decorative.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: always. The report shows how many images have alt="".

It can't tell whether an image is really decorative. That takes a person looking at the page.

What W3C says

• "Decorative images don't add information to the content of a page."
• "In these cases, a null (empty) alt text should be provided (alt="") so that they can be ignored by assistive technologies, such as screen readers."
• "Leaving out the alt attribute is also not an option because when it is not provided, some screen readers will announce the file name of the image instead."

Decorative or not?

• Ask: if the image disappeared, would the reader miss any information? If not, it's decorative.
• An icon beside a button that already says "Download" is decorative. An icon that is the only label on a button is not; it needs a name (check 175).
• Images added with CSS backgrounds are already ignored by screen readers and need nothing.

<img src="divider-wave.svg" alt="">

On devmarde.com

None of the 8 images on our homepage were marked decorative on 6 October; all have descriptive alt text.

Sources

• W3C, Decorative images and Understanding 1.1.1 Non-text Content, checked 6 October 2026.