[reitanqild]

I always thought it was standardized that way in an effort to get people to care about accessibility.

But FWIK it might just be because someone on the standards committee wanted it that way.

[Wowfunhappy]

Does that work though? If you don't care about accessibility, you can still leave out the tags. Screen readers will then default to reading the file name, which I'd argue is worse than skipping over images in the general case.

[reitanqild]

It probably worked better when everyone validated their pages and (I think) html quality used to be a ranking factor in Google.