Thanks for all the replies, in response to astro, yes it is usually page furniture.

This is a scenario which often crops up.

A client makes contact who has a dreamweaver template driven site, there is one large image on each page with the alt 'attribute' set to "Widgets" but since the client had the site built they have branched out into "Sproglets" and "Doodles" Do we change the alts to reflect the subject on the Sproglets pages

or

The client approaches us with the same site, the same one large image and every alt attribute is different with keywords targetted to each individual page. Do we change them all to be identical?

The client want's a quick fix, and they desperately want more Sproglet sales before they go bust.

I guess my question is what will improve their rankings in Google in the short term? I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has any evidence to say that abiding strictly by the accessibility rules actually impoves rankings.