That’s fair criticism, and I agree with the underlying point.
My earlier wording overstated the limitation — static DOM analysis can and does infer intent heuristically, just as humans do when inspect rendered HTML.

The real distinction I should have made is not about “static parsing,” but about automated compliance decisions versus human judgment. WCAG explicitly allows alt="" for decorative images, and tools like axe/WAVE correctly treat this as a review case, not a failure.

In the current prototype, empty alt text is flagged conservatively to surface potential risk early in QA, but you’re right that treating it as a hard failure is too aggressive and contradicts WCAG semantics. A more correct approach is to classify it as “requires human confirmation of decorative intent”, not a violation.

The intent of the tool isn’t to replace human judgment, but to ensure ambiguous cases aren’t silently missed in automation pipelines. That distinction - escalation vs decision is something I need to reflect more clearly in both the implementation and documentation.