What is prefered to use in alt text "&" or "&" for screenreader users?

Question

Services & Products

or

Services & Products

Update:

How popular screen readers and text only browsers will handle &?

Answer 1

Screen readers will read "&" as "and", and text-only browsers will display it as "&".

The reason you write & is because "&" is a special character in XHTML and must be escaped. Any browser/screenreader that understands XHTML knows that & is the escaped ampersand ('&') and will display it as such, or read it aloud as "and".

If you're writing an XHTML document, it's not a case of how to make your alt-text more screenreader friendly - you must replace your bare ampersands with & or risk your document not validating and potentially displaying incorrectly.

Answer 2

In HTML — it doesn't matter (since the ampersand is followed by a space).

In XHTML — & is a well-formedness error and is completely unacceptable.