Re: WCAG considering amending F65 to NOT fail missing ALT text if title or aria-label is present

2013年12月5日 著

I do not agree with the amendment of failure technique F65, which was posted on several mailing lists by Mr. David MacDonald. I do recognize that alt attribute, title attribute and aria-* attributes each have a different objective, thus they can not be alternative each other. Furthermore, support level of alt / title / aria-* attributes are different among user agents / assistive technologies, thus adding alt attribute with appropriate value (e.g. appropriate alternative text) seems most reliable and vital for now. As to say about title and aria-* attributes, we, as a web designer / developer, should choose the right tool for the right job, so. Well, I would like to add my comments on some opinions which are positive to the amendment ...

These alternatives on the img element work in assistive technology

Maybe, but I still believe that alt attribute is more widely supported by user agenets / assitive technologies, no matter if it's old or new, rather than title attribute and wai-* attributes, in terms of conveying alternative content.

The aria spec says these attributes should get an accessible NAME in the API
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#textalternativecomputation

True, but that works only with user agents or assistive technologies which implemented WAI-ARIA spec correctly. aria-* attributes are typically "new" web standards in comparison with alt attribute, so my concern is about users who use "old" user agents / assistive technologies.

They say it's easy to teach beginner programmers to just always use an aria label on everything, rather than requiring a label on form fields and alt on images

Yes, education for beginners is important, but HTML should be prioritized rather than WAI-ARIA, because aria-* attributes should work best with proper markup. And, at least to me, teaching them to just always use alt attribute on every img element and use label on every form fields seems "easy" enough.

They feel as a failure F65 is very strong if fails a page for missing ALT, especially if other things work, and they would like to soften it to allow other things that work.

Of course F65 is strong, because providing alternative text for image IS important :-)

html 5 allows a <figure><legend> combination instead of alt, so they feel WCAG will have to change F65 anyway to allow a figure with a legend, and that helps open the door to this discussion

<figure><legend> combination may omit necessity of alt text, but such case seems very limited, based on my understanding of 4.8.1.1.17 Guidance for conformance checkers, thus it won't affect much on F65 IMHO. Maybe we can add some notes on F65 about the case, but still I can't agree with the amendment, considering old user agents / assistive technologies which don't support HTML5 including figure element.