RE: H86: Providing text alternatives for ASCII art, emoticons, and leetspeak

Steve, one point of confusion I have always had with figure and figcaption is what setting an accessible name calculation does to the figures contents..  The accessible name for the figure and the figcaption can and may often be two separate things and thus my assumption is that setting an accessible name does not mask the contents with the figure or figcaption.  This is desirable because caption is often not the text alternative for a figure.  In addition, some figures are code examples and setting an accessibility name should not override the text inside the figure – much in the same way that the accessible name for region does not override the regions content.  I suspect role also places into this calculation.

So in your example, if we want the accessible name to replace the on-screen characters – wouldn’t we need aria-hidden on the pre tag to make sure that content is not seen by screen readers?  Or does the use of role=”img” automatically do that?  And in then in that case when the role of img is used people need to be aware that figcaption will not be provided to users of AT unless it is associated?  I’m not sure how this is currently supported by assistive technology but in my quick test NVDA and FF announced the accessible name and then the caption but not the text content within the figure but JAWS did announce the text in the figure in addition to the accessible name and caption in FF.

Jonathan

--
Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com<mailto:jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com>

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From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2015 9:50 AM
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: H86: Providing text alternatives for ASCII art, emoticons, and leetspeak

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H86.html


suggest adding ARIA-fied example (from html5 spec)

<figure role="img" aria-labelledby="fish-caption"
   <pre>
   o           .'`/
     '      /  (
   O    .-'` ` `'-._      .')
      _/ (o)        '.  .' /
      )       )))     ><  <
      `\  |_\      _.'  '. \
        '-._  _ .-'       '.)
    jgs     `\__\
   </pre>
   <figcaption id="fish-caption">
    <cite>Joan G. Stark, "fish"</cite>.
    October 1997. ASCII on electrons. 28×8.
   </figcaption>
   </figure>

Also question the use of <abbr> in this technique:
<abbr title="Austin Rocks">Au5t1N r0xx0rz</abbr>
--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>