The "Mark as Decorative" Feature in SharePoint: A Small Toggle With a Big Accessibility Impact

If you've spent any time building pages in SharePoint Online, you've probably noticed a new checkbox tucked inside the Accessibility section of an image's property pane: "Mark as decorative." It looks minor. It isn't. This one toggle solves a problem that authors have quietly struggled with for years — what to do with images that add zero meaning to the page, but that screen readers keep announcing anyway.

Let's unpack what it does, why it exists, and why you should care about it even if you've never thought much about accessibility before.

The problem it solves

Every image on a SharePoint page is supposed to have alt text — a short text description that a screen reader announces instead of showing the image. That makes sense for a photo of your CEO cutting a ribbon, or a chart showing quarterly numbers. Someone using a screen reader genuinely needs to know what's there.

But not every image carries meaning. Think about:

• A background banner behind your page title
• A decorative divider line between sections
• A stock photo used purely to fill space in a Hero web part
• An icon that's already explained by the text next to it

For images like these, forcing authors to write alt text creates noise, not clarity. Screen reader users end up hearing "Image of abstract blue gradient" or "Decorative border graphic" over and over, which interrupts the actual content they're trying to consume. Historically, the workaround was to leave the alt text blank — but SharePoint (and most CMS platforms) would flag that as an accessibility error, since an empty alt attribute looked like a mistake rather than an intentional choice.

What "Mark as Decorative" actually does

Microsoft added this option directly into several core web parts: the Image web part, Image Gallery, Hero, Call to Action, Quick Links, the Text web part (for inline images), and even the Title Region background image.

When you toggle an image as decorative:

• SharePoint sets the underlying markup so assistive technology (screen readers, in particular) skips the image entirely — it's treated as if it isn't there.
• You're no longer required to fill in alt text for that image, and it won't get flagged as missing.
• Sighted users see no difference at all. The image still renders exactly the same way.

In short: it tells the platform, "This image is here for visual polish, not for information — don't waste a screen reader user's time on it."

Why this matters for you as a page author

If you're new to SharePoint, it's easy to treat accessibility settings as boxes to tick for compliance. But this feature actually changes the quality of the experience for real users:

• Less clutter for screen reader users. Every decorative image you correctly mark is one less irrelevant announcement interrupting someone's reading flow.
• Fewer false accessibility warnings. If your organization runs accessibility checkers (many do, especially in regulated industries), decorative images that lack alt text used to show up as errors. Marking them decorative resolves that cleanly, instead of you inventing a fake description just to satisfy the checker.
• Better judgment calls. It forces you to actually ask, for each image: does this communicate something, or is it just wallpaper? That's a useful habit even outside SharePoint.

A word of caution

A few things worth knowing before you start toggling everything as decorative:

1. Don't overuse it. If an image is doing real communicative work — a diagram, a photo of an actual event, a screenshot with instructions — it needs alt text, not the decorative flag. The feature is for purely visual images only.
2. It doesn't fix everything about image accessibility. SharePoint still renders images inside buttons in some web parts, which creates its own separate screen reader quirks (a topic for another post). Marking something decorative doesn't clean up unrelated markup issues.
3. Check your governance guidelines. If your organization has an accessibility policy (common under WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA compliance), make sure "decorative" is being used consistently across authors, not as a shortcut to skip writing alt text.

The takeaway

"Mark as Decorative" is a small, easy-to-miss checkbox — but it reflects a broader shift in how SharePoint treats accessibility: not as an afterthought bolted onto image properties, but as a first-class authoring decision. As you build pages, get in the habit of asking "does this image mean something, or is it just decoration?" That one question, answered correctly and consistently, makes a real difference for the people who rely on assistive technology to use your site.