On a page I have a list of books (only the name and the authors), with their coverpage.
What alt-text should I use on those images?
I have seen a large Dutch online webshop which has the name of the product in the product image;
I have seen 'product details' on all items a page on Amazon with lots of products (so they all have the same alt text)
I wonder what would be good to have when someone has a screenreader. Should I just make it blank so it gets ignored? That sounds lazy, but I don't know what good it would be to listen to the screenreader read 30 books and then say at every book either 'this is a cover image' or the title of the book (which it also reads out because it is the start of the book-paragraph, so then it would be read twice)
Given a layout that might look like this:
+-----------------+
| | Night Circus
| | Erin Morgenstern
| |
| | ISBN
| | A story of something or other, though
| | I cannot be sure as the book is too
| | far away to see clearly.
| |
| |
| |
+-----------------+
I would use a blank alt attribute. Stating the title / author is just verbose and adds nothing. Now, if your site is also pitching the cover art as a selling point, then I would craft custom alternative text for each image. But I don't think that fits here.
Redundant alternative text is frustrating for most screen reader users.