RE: role="presentation" on an image

Hi Steven,
If you're placing a role of presentation on an image, you are telling the AT that the tag is irrelevant to it. It seems like this behavior would be too late to change because browsers, eg Safari and IE, have gone down the road of allowing only one role per tag (I hope I got it right).
For example, <ul role="navigation">, when rendered in IE8, will make IE believe that there is no HTML list in the DOM tree. Similarly, role=presentation cancels out the <img> tag with all its attributes.


From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Steven Faulkner
Sent: Monday, August 23, 2010 5:00 AM
To: W3C WAI-XTECH
Subject: role="presentation" on an image

Hi all,
If an image has a role=presentation and a non empty alt, shouldn't the alt text be passed to AT?

example:

<a href="home.html"><img src="home.gif" alt="home page"></a>

currently this typically results in a screen reader announcing:

"link graphic home page"

when the presenece of the role information seems less than useful in context.

if role="presentation" allaowed the text "content" of the image object to be passed to AT then

<a href="home.html"><img src="home.gif" alt="home page" role="presentation"></a>

would result in the follwoing being announced:

"link home page"

currently this does not work as adding role="presentation" removes the image form the browsers accessible tree.

--
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

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