From: Fred Esch [mailto:fesch@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2016 11:32 AM
I disagree with this statement at least for SVG.
Regardless of how the graphic is drawn, we should never hide the fact that it is a graphic. That information is very important.
Some SVG authoring tools generate path elements for everything instead of using the full suite of drawing primitives; and that is just how they work. In these cases, there is no attempt by the author to use a symbol for text, nor is the author avoiding using the text element. In these cases, telling a user that the text comes from a graphic/path (or n-paths) is not beneficial, nor does it covey what a sighted user sees.
[Jason] I’ve been thinking about this, and I can think of very few situations in which this information would be of benefit to the user. There might be a stylized font on the page that might be referred to in a conversation between a screen reader user and a colleague, but what is desirable in that case is proper font identification, not merely an indication that the text (and it could be the entire text within a given construct) is rendered as a graphic.
In some cases, like when the author chooses a unusual font that is unlikely to be on a user's machine, turning text into a path may be the only way to ensure the visual appearance of the text is maintained on the user's machine. Again, because it is captured as a path element is not important to any user, sighted on not.
[Jason] Agreed, but having the font information could sometimes be useful. Maybe that’s an issue for the CSS Accessibility Task Force, especially if they’re planning to disclose a subset of CSS properties to accessibility APIs.
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