Re: Default role of <IMG> should be "img"

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis, Sun, 12 Sep 2010 15:13:20 +0100:
> On 12 Sep 2010, at 14:45, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>> I have not verified what ARIA says about <img role="presentation" 
>> src="*" alt="<none-empty>"> - does  it require the @alt text to be 
>> hidden?
> 
> I find the spec for role="presentation" fairly hard to follow (and I 
> fear it's going to be impenetrable to your average HTML author), but 
> I don't think so.

ARIA says that an element which does have role="presentation", should 
not be mapped to the accessibility API. I don't know how an <img> that 
is not mapped to the a11y API is treated. Can someone tell? When 
VoiceOver hides such images, then it seems to me that it does the 
opposite of what ARIA says - it maps it to the a11y API instead of not 
doing so.

I don't fear that it is impenetrable to HTML authors.  They should 
instead find it *consistent*: <h1 role="presentation"> does not mean 
that the H1 element becomes hidden, it just means that it - so to speak 
- looses its role. So why should <img role="presentation"> then mean 
that the image gets hidden? All it should mean is that it looses its 
role as image.

E.g. if we have 
	<header><img src="logo" alt="ACME Corp" role="presentation"></header>, 
then the name of the company would be read, without announcing that it 
is an image. I don't see that 
	<header><img src="logo" alt="" role="presentation">
    <span class="somehow-hidden-for-GUI-users">ACME Corp</span></header>
is any advantage to AT users.

Otherwise, if <img role="presentation"> means that the @alt text has to 
be hidden from AT users, then we are in a situation were ARIA is, what 
Ian referred to as "godsend": role="presentation" would allow us to 
flag authoring  alt="not-the-empty-string" in combination with 
role="presentation" as an authoring error. 

We could avoid that role="presenation" simply becomes a godsend for 
better validation if we say that even <img>s with role="presentation" 
should be presented as text, but that they just shouldn't be presented 
as images.

I would like to hear some ARIA experts opinion on this - Richard?
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Sunday, 12 September 2010 18:34:14 UTC