alt="" required for conformance on presentational images

So, Cynthia and I discussed this

Although neither of us think that role="presentation" is not the equivalent
of alt="" we are still left with the backward compatibility issue with
alt="".  Today's authors are required to use alt="" for HTML 4.

So, we can live with role="presentation" on an image requiring alt to be
supplied even though it requires additional (and I think unnecessary) work
required by the author. However, what should be not conforming is the
following:

<img alt="foo" role="presentation">

The reason being that role="presentation" will remove img from the
accessibility tree pre the ARIA specification. If role="presentation" is
applied to an image it MUST have alt="".   We will flag this as an error in
the Open Ajax Alliance rule sets. Do we want to create a bug against last
call to fix this?

Rich

Rich Schwerdtfeger
CTO Accessibility Software Group