Validity - Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications - page 114

Browsing the Web with a screen reader is challenging at best. Try it sometime yourself if you possibly can.
Recruit some blind people to user-test your site while you watch. One thing you can do to improve the
experience is remove the number of images whose alt text must be read. Even things that are logically
content, such as corporate logos, product photos, and book covers, should often have empty alt text if seeing
them is not essential to grasp the content of the page. It takes longer to hear a page than to read it, so
anything you can do to compress the page for blind users is appreciated.
There is one trick you can play to speed up the process and reduce the effort of adding alt text. Many images,
especially decorative and functional ones, are reused on multiple pages. This makes it possible to do a quick
search and replace to add the same alt text to many pages. For example, if you know the file right_arrow.gif is
used throughout the site to point to the next page, you can search for src="right-arrow.gif" and replace it
with the following:
src="right-arrow.gif" alt="next"
You may even want to just search for right-arrow.gif" and right-arrow.gif' to account for tags in different
directories that use different paths to that same file. Literal search is usually sufficient here. You don't need
regular expressions.