No, it shows the author has thought about alt attributes and has included them because doing so is standards compliant.
For images that are purely decorative including an empty alt attrib is valid. People using screen readers (and people with images turned off[1]) don't need to hear (or read)"SMALL RED BULLET" for all 7 items in the list.
[1] I often have images turned off. I'm using a mobile broadband dongle. My ISP uses horrible proxies to compress images. I'm in the UK. The IP of the proxies is 1.2.3.9 through 1.2.3.12 - this is sub-optimal for many obvious reasons. Bypassing this proxy is trivial, but means I download a lot more data.
> For images that are purely decorative including an empty alt attrib is valid. People using screen readers (and people with images turned off[1]) don't need to hear (or read)"SMALL RED BULLET" for all 7 items in the list.
I typically use "-" or "*" as an alt for bullet images in text, and similar decorative markers. It seems to make more sense to me to emphasize that there's a list.
I'm guessing a 3G provider other than Three or Vodaphone - said proxy is why I left T-Mobile. Last I tried you can instruct the proxy not to alter your web traffic using HTTP cache control headers e.g. http://www.lewiz.org/2007/01/hacking-t-mobile-web-proxy.html
Yes! They re-write webpages to insert a bunch of script, which re-writes all alt tags to instructions for fetching higher quality images for this or all images on the page. It is annoying. They also have a psuedo-random interstitial telling me that I'm over the "fair use" allowance.
The only reason I'm still using them is that they don't charge for MB or GB; I pay for three months and get "unlimited surfing". They block some stuff after you hit 1GB, but that's trivially easy to get around. Which I do, since they've said I get unlimited web use.
For images that are purely decorative including an empty alt attrib is valid. People using screen readers (and people with images turned off[1]) don't need to hear (or read)"SMALL RED BULLET" for all 7 items in the list.
[1] I often have images turned off. I'm using a mobile broadband dongle. My ISP uses horrible proxies to compress images. I'm in the UK. The IP of the proxies is 1.2.3.9 through 1.2.3.12 - this is sub-optimal for many obvious reasons. Bypassing this proxy is trivial, but means I download a lot more data.