Re: Summarizing the contentious history of re-opened PFWG-ISSUE-348: Consider renaming (now actually 'deprecating' in ARIA 1.1) role="presentation" to avoid avoid author confusion

Suzanne Taylor <suzanne.taylor@pearson.com> wrote:
> Thx. It’s possible, then, that there should be two roles, one for removing
> semantics, one for marking images (and maybe other items) as
> decorative/atmospheric. The dual purpose is really awkward to explain.

When this was discussed during the development of WCAG, the predominant
opinion was that decorative images should have alt="" so they would be ignored
by assistive technologies. If they were truly decorative, there could be no useful
information conveyed, hence no value in providing a text alternative.

Now that we have ARIA, it would indeed be possible to add a text alternative
and to mark the images as decorative. The interesting question is whether this
is useful enough to justify implementation. How much benefit would be offered
to users, and would they be much interested in reading the text alternatives
of images which would currently be represented as alt="" for the reasons
described above?

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 04:08:57 UTC