Alternative text is an important (and required) attribute on all your images, but many people leave the alt attribute off their images or use text that doesn't do justice to the image itself. Alt text is important for accessibility and also for search engine optimization. But only if you write alt text that describes the images. Learn how to write the best alternative text you can in this article.
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I completely agree with your article and am actually amazed at how many people these days ignore the alt tag. As a matter of fact since IE is the only browser that shows the text roll over I have begun adding the title tag as well only for the same text roll over effect in Mozilla. However the title tag does not have the same effect towards accessibility as the alt tag. So no matter what if it is an important image please put relevant text descriptions in your alt tags. How would you like to miss that one image that says “Act Now, Deal of a Lifetime!” because there was no alt tag specified and you are a disabled person relying on your text reader to tell you the important information on the page.