Image alt attribute best practices

Question

What exactly is the intended use of the alt attribute on tags?

Should it describe the image, or should it provide meaningful re

Answer 1

From w3.org:

While alternate text may be very helpful, it must be handled with care. Authors should observe the following guidelines:

• Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images intended to format a page, for instance, alt="red ball" would be inappropriate for an image that adds a red ball for decorating a heading or paragraph. In such cases, the alternate text should be the empty string (""). Authors are in any case advised to avoid using images to format pages; style sheets should be used instead.
• Do not specify meaningless alternate text (e.g., "dummy text"). Not only will this frustrate users, it will slow down user agents that must convert text to speech or braille output.