Should hero banner be marked as "decorative"

[markconroy]

This came up during testing with a client:

Can the homepage hero be decorative/skipped alt attribute?

Due to the nature of the banner image against the page this should never hold value to understanding context of page, therefore should be skipped so it's not distracting.

What are our thougths?

[willguv]

Yes, think so. It's not essential to the understanding of the page and announcing the alt tag delays the user reaching the main nav

[msayoung]

Sorry @markconroy - I didnt see this earlier.

I disagree that it should be ignored by default.
It completely depends on the image that has been used - in which case marking it decorative should be on a case by case basis.

An approach would be to add a decorative image flag to the banner image paragraph.
See: localgovdrupal/localgov#506

[finnlewis]

@msayoung and @markconroy could you confirm the preferred approach for #420 ?

[markconroy]

I'm happy to agree with Maria, and we fix this on a case-by-case basis for each client. Or file a follow up issue if we need it to add a flag to the paragraph type.