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contentRauno

Render Images with img, Not background-image

MUST

MUST: Render content images with `<img>` + meaningful `alt`, never CSS `background-image` — a background has no role, no accessible name, and no "copy image" context menu. Reserve `background-image` for textures and gradients.

Use an img element for content images so they carry alt text and native save and copy affordances

Bad

Good

Why it matters

A CSS background is decoration as far as the platform is concerned: it has no role, no accessible name, and no context menu entries, so screen readers skip it and users cannot save or copy it. Reserve background-image for textures and gradients, and give anything that is content an img with meaningful alt text (or an empty alt when it is purely decorative).

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.