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🖼️ Exclude Decorative Images From OTTO Alt Text

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Camilo Aponte

Camilo Aponte

Last updated on Sep 30, 2026

🔍 Why This Matters

Decorative images — icons, dividers, background flourishes, and purely aesthetic visuals — should have empty alt attributes (alt="") by accessibility and SEO best-practice standards. If OTTO applies descriptive alt text to these images, it can introduce unnecessary noise into your page's semantic structure and potentially flag accessibility issues. This guide shows you how to keep OTTO's alt text optimization focused only on meaningful, content-bearing images.

⚙️ How OTTO Handles Alt Text Optimization

When OTTO processes a page, it scans all img elements and generates or improves alt text for images that are missing it or have weak descriptions. By default, OTTO does not distinguish between decorative and informational images automatically — it optimizes based on what it detects in the markup. Understanding this helps you set the right boundaries before OTTO runs.

🛠️ Step-by-Step: Excluding Decorative Images

  1. Navigate to SEO Automation. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO, then open SEO Automation inside it, or go directly to /seo-automation-v3.
  2. Open your active OTTO session for the site you want to configure.
  3. Go to the Image Optimization settings. Inside the OTTO dashboard, locate the Alt Text or Image SEO section. This is where you control which images OTTO is permitted to modify.
  4. Use the exclusion rules for individual images. OTTO provides an image-level exclusion option. Select any image flagged for optimization, then choose Exclude from optimization. This marks that specific image as off-limits for alt text changes without affecting any other images on the same page.
  5. Apply a CSS class or attribute-based rule (recommended for scale). If your CMS or theme applies a consistent class to decorative images (for example, decorative, icon, or bg-image), you can add that class or attribute pattern to OTTO's global exclusion list. OTTO will skip any image carrying that identifier across your entire site, saving you from excluding images one by one.
  6. Mark images with role="presentation" or aria-hidden="true" in your CMS. OTTO respects these standard accessibility attributes. Images that already carry role="presentation" or aria-hidden="true" are automatically skipped during alt text optimization — no additional configuration required.
  7. Save and re-deploy. After setting your exclusion rules, click Save Changes and allow OTTO to re-process the affected pages. Verify the results in the Optimized Images log to confirm decorative images are no longer being modified.

✅ Best Practices for Decorative Image Management

  • Standardise your CMS classes early. Assign a dedicated CSS class (e.g., img-decorative) to all purely aesthetic images in your theme or page builder. Adding this class to OTTO's exclusion list once protects every decorative image site-wide.
  • Use empty alt attributes as your source of truth. Images already carrying alt="" in your HTML are treated by OTTO as intentionally empty. OTTO will not overwrite a deliberately empty alt attribute, so setting alt="" at the CMS level is a reliable safeguard.
  • Audit before activating alt text optimization on new pages. Before enabling OTTO on a page-type that contains many decorative elements (landing pages, icon grids, portfolio galleries), review the image list inside OTTO and apply exclusions proactively.
  • Do not exclude the entire page. Excluding a full page to avoid optimizing a handful of decorative images means missing out on alt text improvements for all the valuable content images on that page. Always prefer image-level or class-level exclusions.

🔎 Troubleshooting: OTTO Still Optimizing Excluded Images

  • Check that the exclusion was saved. Navigate back to the Image SEO settings and confirm the image or rule appears in your exclusion list.
  • Confirm the CSS class matches exactly. Exclusion rules are case-sensitive. Ensure the class or attribute value in OTTO matches what your CMS outputs in the rendered HTML.
  • Re-deploy the OTTO session. Exclusion rules apply on the next processing cycle. If you added an exclusion after a recent optimization run, trigger a manual re-deploy from the OTTO dashboard.
  • Verify the image URL hasn't changed. Dynamic image URLs (e.g., resized or CDN-transformed URLs) may create new entries in OTTO's image list. Apply class-based rules rather than URL-based rules for images that change frequently.

💬 Need More Help?

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