> You are spouting off a strong opinion that hasn't benefitted
> from any actual knowledge of the topic
> or from thinking about it for a more than a second.
I made my first website in the late '90s and have been doing web apps for a living for over a decade. I have thought about it quite a bit over the years, and I have been on both sides of the issue.
> just to provoke a defense
I was not looking for a defense. I was trying to help others not feel guilty for not doing something that I think seldom makes a real difference. I'm thinking of most of the articles I have read, and I'm thinking of the difference to a screen reader in either case: (1) stopping to read some alt text or (2) simply silently skipping over it and just reading the article. In many cases I think it's best not to break the flow or waste the person's time.
> An image without the alt attribute is not even valid HTML.
The spec says it is for a few cases (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/embedded-content.html...). But yes, for the case I'm thinking of it insists we explicitly put alt="". I think this is tedious and overstepping its bounds. If a writer doesn't want to put alt text for one of his images, he shouldn't have to. He chose to write an article instead of doing nothing.
And I'm not really talking about being lazy. I'm talking about not wasting the reader's time. If you tell everyone it's better to put an alt tag than nothing at all, then you're going to get a lot of poorly written and annoyingly redundant alt text. If someone writes a text-based article, then it is handicap-accessible, with or without alt tags. What might be less accessible would be an article typeset with images (which is rare nowadays anyways) --- but even then, computers are so good now at deciphering images that even that might not be much of a problem either.
And I'm not really talking about being lazy. I'm talking about not wasting the reader's time. If you tell everyone it's better to put an alt tag than nothing at all, then you're going to get a lot of poorly written and annoyingly redundant alt text. If someone writes a text-based article, then it is handicap-accessible, with or without alt tags. What might be less accessible would be an article typeset with images (which is rare nowadays anyways) --- but even then, computers are so good now at deciphering images that even that might not be much of a problem either.