RE: Failure of Success Criterion Question for F30 and F38

Hi Andrew,

My only thought about F30 is, it perhaps could be construed that what is being attempted, no doubt benignly, is the use of content that is hidden from one group (e.g. AT users), to aid another (spiders).

Perhaps it is not inconceivable that a Google algorithm change one day might spot this approach and assume it is in some way bad and treat it as a negative signal, potentially impacting SEO.

It sounds as if the IMG alt is being used as a way to make up for a perceived deficiency in actual content. In other words, if a sentence or paragraph of real copy were added, providing the meaning that the ALT text was attempting to do but in a human, spider and AT readable way, then this issue would be solved with no potential stored risk as it would just be simple copy for all to read.

I am sorry I am not able to help more, nonetheless I hope this was of some help, apologise if I have misunderstood anything, and wish you good luck with this.

-Alan
All views expressed here are my own personal views and do not represent the opinions of any other entity.


From: Andrew Ly [mailto:andrew.ly19@gmail.com]
Sent: July-22-19 10:58 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Failure of Success Criterion Question for F30 and F38

Hi,

I'm reaching out since my organization has been working on updating our policies to be fully AODA compliant and accessible for all audiences.

The success criterion around images has been rather specific and on our end and we wanted to get some clarification.

F30:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F30

Would it be considered a failure for this success criteria if alt text was present (describing the image to help search crawlers better understand the image), but the image is considered decorative and hidden (role="presentation", or aria-hidden="true" for screen readers)?

Alt text is typically used to help us better optimize our pages and content for search engines and by stripping it out completely across the majority of images being decorative could have a significant impact on our visibility overall.

F38:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F38

In this criteria, only role="presentation" is identified as being the success criteria to mark up decorative images with to hide it from assistive technology.

Are other methods to (such as aria-hidden="true") valid for this criterion, or do we HAVE to use role="presentation" solely? We've tested aria-hidden="true" with multiple auditing tools and no issues were detected, but if the success criteria is taken literally, only role="presentation" is acceptable?

Thanks in advance!