role = 'img'

Dear Group,
Right now icon fonts are the only barrier to replacing the author's font.
The text width problem that was anticipated earlier has not materialized to
be a problem.

So, I am hoping this can be a best practice with strong encouragement.

It really is a total misuse of semantics. People use text element tags like
<i> and <span> to carry pictures.

This would be innocuous if these were not targets of font change. The <i>
is important to low vision because it changes the way font looks in a bad
way. <span> is important because it has no natural semantics.

If this problem was solved the issue of changing font could be addressed
with font-family style, but without use of role an extension approach is
needed. Then the at can only guess. Does class contain a particular set of
values? Is the included text one character long?

A font analyzer has now unambiguous way to separate text for font
replacement and pictures disguised as text to leave alone.

I need some help, if I am to automate stylesheet selection for non-experts.

Best, Wayne