Can I stop Voice Over reading images in Mac OSX?

Hi. I have a rather annoying problem. I am using a piece of software under MacOSX and it contains a table with each line starting with a number of images. I don't want voice over to read any aspect of these images and instead read the section of text that follows the images on the same line.

So instead of voice over reading "image, image, this is the text I want to hear". It would read just "This is the text I want to hear".

I've looked at the verbosity settings for images and it's possible to stop voice over reading the word "image" to indicate it's an image, but doing this means having either the description or status ticked instead, so I still get unwanted verbal feedback.

Ideally what I would like to do is to uncheck all of the verbosity boxes under the custom settings for images, thus in effect making the images disappear altogether. However voice over insists that there should be at least one check box selected for some strange reason.

It's possible to completely take images out of the voice over equation with web navigation, i'm wondering if there is a similar way to stop voice over reading images under general OSX navigation?

Hope this makes sense and sorry for any waffle, but it's becoming irritating! and i'd love to find a solution!

Regards, Stu.