Decorative Images That Should Say Nothing

Silence is a choice you have to make

An image with an empty description is skipped, and an image with no description attribute at all is frequently announced by its file name.

So a decorative image left untouched can produce a screen reader reading out something like header underscore swoosh two final dot jpeg.

Which is why marking something decorative is a deliberate action rather than doing nothing.

On most small business sites, the majority of images should be marked this way.

What is decorative

• Background textures and gradients.
• Dividers and flourishes.
• An icon beside text that says the same thing.
• A stock photograph of nothing in particular.
• A repeated element in every card.

The third is the most common and the least recognised. A telephone icon next to a telephone number does not need describing, because the number beside it already says what it is.

The test

Which is short and settles nearly every case.

Remove the image mentally and read the page without it.

If nothing is missing, it is decorative.

If the page now makes less sense, or a claim has lost its evidence, it is meaningful and needs a description.

Where you genuinely cannot decide, ask what you would say about it if somebody rang and asked what was on the page, and if the answer is nothing, that settles it.

Most images fail this test in the decorative direction, which surprises people.

A worked example

A business had descriptions on every image because they had been told everything needed one.

Listening to their home page, a visitor heard: decorative line, telephone icon, telephone icon, quotation mark graphic, decorative line, star, star, star, star, star.

The five stars were a rating already stated in text as four point eight out of five.

They marked all of it decorative, and the page went from about forty seconds of noise before the content to reaching it almost immediately.

Nothing was lost, since none of those images carried information.

Doing less was the entire improvement.

The star rating case

Worth handling on its own, since it appears everywhere.

Five star images with descriptions produce five announcements of the word star, which is not how anybody wants to receive a rating.

The right arrangement is to state the rating in text once, as four point eight out of five, and mark the stars decorative.

The same applies to any set of repeated icons standing in for a number.

That change makes the page better for everybody, since the number is more precise than counting shapes.

Icons that are the only content

Which is the exception to the icon rule.

An icon that is a link with no text beside it, such as a social icon in a footer or a magnifying glass for search, is not decorative.

That icon is the entire control, so it needs a name: search, or the platform it links to.

Without one, somebody hears link and nothing else, repeated four times across the footer.

The distinction is whether the icon is accompanied by words or is standing alone doing a job.

Check your footer specifically, since that is where this fails on most sites.

Background images are usually already silent

A technical point that saves time.

Images applied through styling rather than placed in the page are generally not announced at all, which means they are already treated as decorative.

That is usually correct and occasionally wrong, where somebody has put meaningful content into a background image.

A hero image with text baked into it, applied as a background, is invisible to a screen reader entirely.

So the check for backgrounds is whether they contain anything that matters, rather than whether they are described.

Marking them is a batch job

Which is why this is the easy half.

Decorative images all get the same treatment, so they can be done together without thinking about each one.

Do them first, since it clears most of the list and leaves only the images that genuinely need writing.

Working through the easy pile first also makes the remaining number small enough that nobody abandons the job halfway.

In most systems this is a matter of leaving the description field empty and saving, which the platform records correctly.

Confirm with a checker afterwards that they are recorded as empty rather than as missing entirely, which is the one thing that can quietly go wrong here.

The same logic applies to everything repeated

Since images are only the most obvious case of announcing something twice.

A card that repeats the same read more link twelve times, a button whose name matches the heading directly above it, and a caption identical to the description all create the same effect.

Somebody moving through a page by links or headings hears the repetition far more sharply than somebody scanning it visually.

So the question to carry beyond images is whether anything on the page is said twice for a listener and once for a reader.

Fixing that is the same work as marking an image decorative, applied to the rest of the page.

The counter-case

The line is not always obvious.

An image that seems decorative to you may be carrying tone or context that a description would usefully convey, particularly on a page about people.

Automated checkers also cannot tell the difference and will not flag a wrongly silenced image, so this is a judgement nothing verifies.

And erring toward describing something is safer than erring toward silence in the cases where you genuinely cannot tell.

Apply the removal test, mark the decorative majority as a batch, and check your footer icons separately.

What to do

1. Read the page without each image.
2. Mark decorative ones as a batch.
3. Use an empty description, not none.
4. State ratings in text and silence the stars.
5. Name any icon standing alone.
6. Check background images for hidden text.
7. Confirm with a checker.

Step three is the distinction that matters, since an empty description means skip this and a missing one frequently means read out the file name.

What happens when images do not load at all is covered in images off by default.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.