Your thoughts on updated "Icon Font with an On-Screen Text Alternative" Technique

Hello Everyone,

Thank you so very much for our discussion yesterday [1].

I updated the description for the "Icon Font with an On-Screen Text
Alternative" [1] technique trying to incorporate ideas from our
meeting. It now reads:

<quote>
The objective of this technique is to show how to provide a visible,
text alternative for an icon font that conveys information.

Icon fonts are fonts that use the Private Use Area (PUA) of Unicode.
Typically they are inserted in HTML via the CSS @font-face declaration
and generated content property. Since they are vectors they are
scalable and resolution-independent.

Icon fonts can have 2 problems:

1. Some people with disabilities may not use assistive technology (AT)
and rely on on-screen text alternatives.
2. For those who do use AT, voicing of icon fonts may be inaccurate,
nonsensical, redundant, or unpredictable.

To solve these 2 problems aria-hidden="true" is used so AT will
ignored the icon. Then an on-screen text alternative is added to
convey meaning to everyone.
<unquote>

Thoughts? Is that clearer? Suggestions for improved verbiage?

In addition, I added a definition section to the document per Andrew's
suggestion of having an icon font definition. If anyone knows of
better definitions please let me know and I can revise that section.
The ones I found are very informal.

Thank you.

Kindest Regards,
Laura

[1] https://www.w3.org/2016/07/28-lvtf-minutes.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Icon_Font_with_an_On-Screen_Text_Alternative
--
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Friday, 29 July 2016 11:30:28 UTC