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Rule Change: report whitespace-only string as alt text in markdown image #749
Description
What rule do you want to change?
require-alt-text
What change do you want to make?
Generate more warnings
How do you think the change should be implemented?
A new default behavior
Example code
What does the rule currently do for this code?
Rule does not report this, as it does with <img src="logo.png" alt=" ">
What will the rule do after it's changed?
Rule will report the whitespace-only string as alt text in markdown image, so rule can force to add a meaningful text as alternative.
Participation
- I am willing to submit a pull request to implement this change.
AI acknowledgment
- I did not use AI to generate this issue report.
- (If the above is not checked) I have reviewed the AI-generated content before submitting.
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DMartens commentedon Oct 2, 2026
The quotes inside the square brackets are kept when generating HTML (demo).
As such
is equal to<img src="logo.png" alt='" "'>which is also not reported.But I agree that this is not helpful alt text.
We could either strip known characters such as the quotes or check that the alt text has a known letter via a regular expression.
lumirlumir commentedon Oct 8, 2026
I think adding a rule like
no-restricted-alt-text, as suggested in #713, or adding an option torequire-alt-textto restrict which text is allowed or disallowed makes sense.That said, as noted,
is represented in the AST with an alt-text value of"\" \"", sorequire-alt-textrule intentionally doesn’t report cases like this.Tanujkanti4441 commentedon Oct 9, 2026
I think adding an option is a good idea to expand
require-alt-text, right now rule is just asking to add alternate text now this option will let the users to validate that text also.