No, there is no option to disable this feature. It forces you to make a decision about the alt text on your images and whether or not a given image needs to have one.
I find it very difficult to imagine a front-end method to provide alt attributes that is able to provide text that is at all useful; what are you using for that?
That’s a bummer.
This is the plugin that we’re using to add alt tags.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/pb-seo-friendly-images/
It allows us to not go through working with one image at a time just to add alt tags. It automates the process for us. I hope that in the future there will be an option to disable the force alt tags.
That plug-in is definitely not satisfying the needs of users with disabilities. While it’s adding alt attributes to your content, which will allow the site to pass automated tests, it doesn’t do anything to actually help users. It does have a configuration option that would be usable (%media_alt), but that would still depend on your consciously adding an alt attribute.
