Have you not learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf?

But asking a webmaster to fix an alt tag on a link won't confuse
the webmaster at all if he/she is any good at all at their job.

Maybe.  Or maybe they will immediate spot you as pretender and dismiss
your complaint out of hand, perhaps politely.  How about this:  You
tell them the problem you encounter and leave it them to fix it?

They'll understand the alt tag is for the image that goes with the link.

What if their is no image near the link?  The image in question is
*not* part of the link.  In fact, if I had not mentioned it, I doubt
that the image would have been brought into this particular discussion
at all.

Where's the problem with that?

Here's an alogy for you, which will gets a better response:
Help Police, Charles Manson is in my back yard!
Help Police, there is a raggedy man standing in my backyard staring
into my kitchen window.

Then there is also the issue of complaining to the police about
potholes on your street.  They will be polite the first time you call.

Haven't you ever had someone tell you  their computer has 20GB of memory?

RAM and HD are both kinds of memory.  A better example would be the
person complaining about their RAM making clicking noise.  But again,
it would be better if they stuck with the actually symptoms rather
than ill-informed guesses at the problem.  This analogy also doesn't
work unless you are actually *paying* the web master to do something.
If you are merely a complaining end-user, don't needlessly damage your
credibility.

Same thing with web  masters, any webmaster that has a
clue about what they've created will know what I meant.

It really depends on the personality of the web master.  Some people
will dismiss a spurious complaint out of hand.  Or worse, take you
seriously, and then waste a lot of time realizing the alt on the image
wasn't a problem at all and that the link is coded just fine, or stop
doing something (using tile on text links) that many people, included
many people with disabilities, find to actually be very useful.

Yes, it was mistyped, but nonetheless, it will get the point across.

Let's try phrasing the question for the actual situation.

Hey web master!  I notice that your link for energy assistance on
mdtap.org isn't very obvious to me because just the word energy is
spoken by my preferred screen reader.  I have noticed that using a
different screen reader the words energy assistance is spoken.  Can
you code your web page so that my preferred screen screen reader works
like that different screen reader?  Thanks!

Now, who should that message go to?

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