Is alt the same as alt=“”?

Question

I'm adding alt attributes to all my images to improve SEO/screen reader performance.

Per best practice, images that are purely aesthetic should have an empty alt attribute alt=""so screen readers skip over them. I'm in WordPress and noticed it does add alt to these descriptionless aesthetic images, but not alt="".

Does alt get read the same as alt="" by screen readers and search engine crawlers, or should I go in and programatically force an alt=""?

Answer 1

Yes, it's the same: https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#attributes-0

Empty attribute syntax

Just the attribute name. The value is implicitly the empty string.

To me, that says that an attribute with no value is the same as having a value of empty string.

This answer says the same.