Default role of <IMG> should be "img"

hi ben,
you wrote:
"As a user, I personally think it's highly suboptimal if to consume a
webpage I
need to view UI images (e.g. icons) or even be notified of their existence.
More generally, I think it's a real failure that a purportedly media
independent, user-formattable markup language requires this."

There is NO requirement, it is up to AT whether they report and how they
report role information provided via an accessibility API for any element.

But there SHOULD be a requirement that all HTML elements, where they can be
mapped to accessibility APIs are mapped and that mapping reflects the
objects they represent.

I asked this question on twitter the other day:
"Do vision impaired users want to know an image on a web page is an image?
or should the information be always hidden from them?"

here are some of  the responses from screen reader users:

 For me personally it's important to know. I use e.g. "g" to find them, too.


http://twitter.com/DesignedByBlind/status/23902113272

Absolutely want to know. All semantic info should be available. Sometimes
> important to know text is not the primary modality.


http://twitter.com/jcsteh/status/23943684788

want to know an image as an image and a useful alt text


http://twitter.com/KevinChao89/status/23932251747


I want to know an image is an image, unless it's a spacer or other * purely
> * stylistic image.


http://twitter.com/ezufelt/status/23902012700


I am not claiming the desire to have an images role reported as an image is
uniform among users BUT it is not for HTML5 to dictate that <img> or any
other element must not be mapped to an appropriate role in accessibility
APIs.


regards
Stevef

On 12 September 2010 00:54, <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org> wrote:

> http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10481
>
>
>
>
>
> --- Comment #48 from Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
>  2010-09-11 23:54:44 ---
> (In reply to comment #42)
> > > I'm sympathetic to Ian's concern to avoiding cluttering
> speech/text/braille
> > > renderings with irrelevant information,
> >
> > Which poses a larger questions: is this a solution in search of a
> problem?
>
> I don't think so. In my experience, screen reader users (for example) often
> mention "clutter" generally in webpages as a problem. Here's a few examples
> from public mailing lists:
>
>   *
> http://www.mail-archive.com/jaws-users-list@jaws-users.com/msg18188.html
>
>   *
> http://www.mail-archive.com/jaws-users-list@jaws-users.com/msg27293.html
>
>   *
> http://www.mail-archive.com/blindhandyman@yahoogroups.com/msg13088.html
> ("graphics laden web sites")
>
> All things being equal, reduction of clutter is good.
>
> > Has this ever been reported as a problem?
>
> End-users seem highly unlikely to articulate concerns in terms of how
> elements
> are mapped to accessibility APIs, but JAWS's announcing of "graphic"
> sometimes
> comes up as a user annoyance, e.g.:
>
>   * http://www.freelists.org/post/jfw/graphic [2006]
>
>   * http://www.freelists.org/post/jfw/graphics (and thread) [2010]
>
> As a user, I personally think it's highly suboptimal if to consume a
> webpage I
> need to view UI images (e.g. icons) or even be notified of their existence.
> More generally, I think it's a real failure that a purportedly media
> independent, user-formattable markup language requires this.
>
> So it would be great if we could work out a way to discard such irrelevant
> information. But I suspect it's not safe to do this in the blanket manner
> suggested by Hixie, even though some implementations apparently do this
> (e.g.
> Safari+VoiceOver). Maybe there's some heuristics we could come up with
> (e.g.
> images that are links, buttons, headings versus content images), or maybe
> not.
>
> If not, I guess we need wider and better implementations of CSS3 Replaced
> Content (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-content/) that expose the replaced text
> to
> accessibility APIs so that authors stop having to use "img" for safe-ish
> text
> replacement.
>
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>


-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org
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