They used to. But your comment made me search a bit and it seems most don't any more, you have to turn that on.
I guess you can then use alt="" for "decorational" images and practically hide them from screen readers? It still seems odd to me though to even have these kind of images.
My view is that most images are decorational in the terms that we're talking about. You can view a photo of a burst dam, to take one of my examples, but a description of the scene should be in the article already, and therefore any further description is superfluous. The "should" in that sentence is doing a lot of work though - I don't think people consider this kind of stuff much at all, not on a deep level about why they're doing things. My first proper web job was in the BBC in the late 90s, and it was a really steep learning curve but has stood me in really good stead when considering this kind of stuff.
I have trouble wrapping my head around this. When I think of decorational images, it's mostly back to times when we used spacers or built table layouts with sliced images. I drank the semantic cool aid. Decoration should be separate from content.
Of course a stock image in an article is not really important and may not add much value, but someone thought including it did add some at least. It just seems weird then to say that screen reader users should never even be made aware that it is there.
Obviously from all the comments, this seems to be what people do. Still, it seems somehow wrong to me. If the image sets tone, should we not try to convey that? If it really serves no purpose, should we not just leave it out at all?
> Of course a stock image in an article is not really important and may not add much value
Not sure if anybody has mentioned this, but a super common case is that stock and other images (photos especially) require attribution. Working in the digital accessibility space, I see a huge number of examples of an image being marked as decorative (or worse, being implemented as a background image in the CSS) with an inline credit line. So as a screen reader user, I'm reading an article and keep spotting these notices all over the place, with no hint of what they accompany. In those cases, the image must have a description, even if it is thought that it doesn't add value.
> back to times when we used spacers or built table layouts with sliced images
Haha! Someone of roughly my own vintage I see...
I get what you're saying, but perhaps if you think about it in terms of sensory modalities it might help. There are images which convey a feeling purely through its aesthetic that are ruined to the point of uselessness by plain description in written language, a bit like having to explain a joke: "You see, the expectation is that the chicken crossing the road is going to be for a funny reason, like a pun, or something, but having set up that expectation the fact that you've subverted the expectation makes it funny."
Better not to interrupt the reading flow just to let someone know there's something there, the purpose of which you can't really describe in any meaningful way.
The issue here is that despite screen readers, text is simply not the same as images.
Spamming a page with redundant visual imagery that's easy to take in at a glance is fine. But its terrible to screen read, because reading is much more expensive than glancing. For the alt text, it's important to only give valuable non-redundant information.
I guess you can then use alt="" for "decorational" images and practically hide them from screen readers? It still seems odd to me though to even have these kind of images.