Find images missing alt text

Goal: Spot images with no alt text — a quick accessibility check before publishing.

Prerequisites: None.

Query

select(.image.alt == "")

$ mq 'select(.image.alt == "")' README.md

Just the file paths, for a punch list:

$ mq 'select(.image.alt == "") | .image.url' README.md

Input

![A cute cat](cat.png)

![](missing-alt.png)

![Team photo](team.jpg)

Output

![](missing-alt.png)

Notes

• .image.alt on its own skips images with empty alt text (selectors drop falsy matches), so it’s only useful for listing the alt text that does exist. To find the gaps, filter explicitly with select(.image.alt == "").
• Gotcha: a non-matching node’s result is None after select, and None results are what actually get suppressed from output — not “filtering” in a control-flow sense. Plain field access on that None (like .image.url above) stays None and stays suppressed. But routing it through something that produces a real value even for None input — string concatenation (__FILE__ + ": " + .image.url), or a function like is_none(self) — “launders” it into a non-None result, and it prints for every node, defeating the filter. Keep transformations after select limited to plain field/selector access, or restructure so the select is the last step.