I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to make sure that any web sites I produce standards compliant in addition to being functional and ‘pretty.’   I’ve decide that defining all my web site pages as XHTML Transitional is what I am striving for, and this means (among other things) that all my images must have ALT tags defined.

That seems easy enough, right?  An ALT tag is just a description of the image, right?   Well… maybe. 

Image if you were blind and all of your image ALT tags were converted to text and read to you as part of your web site’s content.  For me, that is a scary thought as most of my ALT tags would be pretty meaningless when used in conjunction with my page content.

To help me better understand with the appropriate use of the ALT tag is, I found this article very insightful:

Use of ALT Text in IMGs

For the most part, it would appear as though I should leave many of my ALT tags empty (ALT=””) because there is no sense in describing images that are just there for creating the look and feel of the site.