- From: Ramón Corominas <rcorominas@technosite.es>
- Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 12:59:53 +0000
- To: mzehe@mozilla.com
- CC: Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca>, HTML Accessibility Task Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>, WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>, kirsten@can-adapt.com
Hello, all, Marco: CSS background images that convey information fail SC 1.1.1 according to Failure F3, so I would not consider a technique that allows (or even promotes) another failure. Regards, Ramón. Marco wrote: > One problem I see here is the fact that we are no longer dealing with > sole images provided by the img tag alone. Another now common source of > missing alternative text for images is when context, or even > interactable controls, are provided via CSS background images. In HTML, > these are merely referenced by a CSS class name or similar, and are not > on image tags, but on something as simple as a span or even b or i. Yes, > I have seen all of these in the wild. > > Those images need alternative text to be accessible, too, but there is > no alt attribute for these. The only way to make these accessible is via > aria-label or aria-labelledby. > > So while it is correct that the proper way for an image tag to provide > alt text is via the alt attribute, for other images this technique does > not apply, and needs aria-label or aria-labelledby. And while I, in > principle, agree with Steve and others that alt should be paramount, I > also see the fact that we have to teach two different techniques to web > developers for things that are not so dissimilar in principle. > > I am torn, and I haven't made a final decision yet whether the > requirement should be loosened. The part of me saying "use native over > ARIA wherever possible" says "yes", the part that teaches accessibility > to web developers almost on a daily basis says "loosen it so they can > have a common technique and not remember two different things for > similar concepts".
Received on Monday, 25 November 2013 19:23:07 UTC