Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
As I said above, and as you repeat in your post, alt="" is perfectly valid and recommended in decorative images. But sometimes images are not just decorative, they may be a sample of hand-written text, a strange symbol, or even an illustration that's closely linked to the text ("and this is what he found when he opened the door: [here comes an illustration]"). For those cases you need to provide something meaningful in the alt attribute. For the rest, just use alt="". Apple is not requiring anything new, but they may be providing bad examples.
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In such cases, I believe the alt tag is what allows the text that is shown in image form to become searchable. Very important in a book that uses, for example, pictures of a sign, or handwritten notes, which cannot be coded as plain text and an image is used instead. If it is important to the book, people searching for it will fail to find it -- unless an alt tag gives the text to the search engine of the ereader.