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I'm having trouble getting my accessibility team to add alt text to our site's images for SEO benefits as they feel some of it would add additional noise for screen readers.  They proposed using ARIA-hidden attributes to hide the text but I'm wondering if will that be interpreted as a cloaking tactic to search engines?  Also, I'm wondering if it the alt text will carry the same weight if ARIA-hidden is used. Has anyone had any experience with this? I'm having trouble finding any research on the topic.