How to Correctly Set Alt Text for Decorative Images in WordPress

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Most accessibility guides advise adding alt text to every image, but decorative images — such as dividers, background textures, and ornaments — should have an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them entirely. Leaving the alt attribute out altogether is equally problematic, as some screen readers will then read the raw file name aloud to users. In WordPress's block editor, leaving the 'Alternative text' field blank correctly outputs alt="" in the HTML, which is the intended behavior. Icons that duplicate adjacent text labels are decorative and need empty alt text, while standalone clickable icons with no visible label are meaningful and require descriptive alt text. Editors can verify correct implementation by previewing a page and checking the source HTML to confirm decorative images display alt="" rather than a missing attribute.

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Terraform Explained: How Infrastructure as Code Works from Init to Destroy

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Six-gate checklist helps RPG devs validate core loop before adding content

A framework aimed at small RPG prototype developers proposes testing six essential gameplay gates before expanding a project with more rooms, enemies, or loot. The six gates cover player orientation, meaningful encounters, visible choices with trade-offs, state feedback, consequence continuity, and restart motivation. The author argues that most dungeon-crawler prototypes grow in scope prematurely, adding content before a single short run of three to five minutes is proven understandable and repeatable. Developers are advised to run the prototype once without explanation, identify the first point of confusion, fix only that issue, and repeat the process. The checklist is described as engine-neutral, applying equally to projects built in Godot, Unity, or any custom framework.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

How PgBouncer Pool Exhaustion Silently Kills API Performance

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Developer builds Python tool to copy codebase context directly to clipboard for chatbots

An 18-year-old developer has released a Python command-line tool called 'reptclip' that copies a project's file structure and selected source files to the clipboard, making it easier to provide codebase context to AI chatbots. The tool was created to address the tedious manual process of copying and pasting files and folder trees into chat interfaces. It can be installed via pip and supports include/exclude flags with glob patterns, as well as a per-project TOML configuration file with preset support. Files larger than 1MB and binary files are automatically excluded from the output, with a placeholder inserted in their place. The project is open source and available on GitHub.

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