Re: Failure of Success Criterion Question for F30 and F38

On 22/07/2019 15:58, Andrew Ly wrote:
> 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.

As Alan already said, this sounds more like an attempt at 
keyword-stuffing, or could be perceived that way by search engines 
anyway and penalised. Optimise your content for human audiences first 
and foremost, and search engines (that try to actually perceive the page 
as a human audience would) will appropriately rank/categorise it. If 
you're having issues with pages appearing for certain phrases, then 
perhaps optimise your actual visible text.

> 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

Techniques are not exhaustive. Failure techniques should fail always 
(i.e. if you do this, it's a fail), while positive techniques are only 
ever to be considered one of a series of possible approaches that 
satisfy the underlying criterion. So short answer, yes.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Monday, 22 July 2019 18:50:34 UTC