@gdunlop1 @dirkliesenfeld @siteimpulse @binyaz
As I have explained elsewhere there is no need to add a ALT tag to the Lazy Load loading placeholder Gif as Google can see the image url and the image ALT text.
In fact adding a fixed ALT text to the lazyload placeholder would harm your SEO and affect User Accessibility.
You can read Googles Image Best Practices guide here
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en
In that Guide they recommend using a Google Chrome extension called ‘Accessibility Developer Tools” but you’ll see it has been depreciated in favor of Google Lighthouse’ https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/
You can check this for yourselves by running a Google Lighthouse audit on your page / post.
In the Accessibility section it will list any images that are missing ALT text that can be seen by Google
Look in the ‘Names and Labels’ section. It will list the “Failing Elements’ there
If you see this
img.lazy-hidden
Put your mouse over it and you will see which image or images that are being lazy loaded and don’t have ALT text
The Lazy Load URL to Google looks like this – this URL tells Google bot that the images is lazy loaded and the url of the ‘real’ image (and the image meta data)
<image class= “lazy-hidden” src=exampledomain.com/wp-content/plugins/a3-lazy-load/assets/images/lazy-placeholder.gif data-lazy-type= “image” data-src=”http://exampledomain.com/wp-content/uploads/imagename.jpg” align=”centre’>
If you see that, it means that your image does not have ALT text. Add ALT text to the image and test again and you will not see it listed. If you still don’t see it and the image is being added by another script, example a slider, you now know that the slider does not support ALT text for the images in the slider (it happens).
Once the image/s have ALT text this is what Google Bot sees
<image class= “lazy-hidden” src=exampledomain.com/wp-content/plugins/a3-lazy-load/assets/images/lazy-placeholder.gif data-lazy-type= “image” data-src=”http:exampledomain.com/wp-content/uploads/imagename.jpg” align=”centre’ alt=”your alt text”
If you are using some third party SEO optimizing tool that is telling you that lazy loaded images don’t have ALT text then you should report this to the developers and ask them to update their script to view lazy loaded images the same way that Google search bot see’s them.
Hope that helps
Steve
