Open scottaohara opened 2 years ago
This is great. Does it have to be limited to images? I'm wondering if it can be used for animations/motion.
Discussed at https://www.w3.org/2022/06/02-aria-minutes.html#t05
potential alternative name "contextual-image"
I approve of this but if we're going there, I would like to see the "connotative" case considered too, and as distinct from "decorative".
Connotative (or "mood-setting") images fall somewhere between content and decoration, and have generated far too much discussion at my workplace, and with our auditors who (being outside the problem domain) often can't tell the difference.
The "child with the balloon on the account sign-up page" case mentioned in the aria minutes has this quality. It suggests "we're a friendly sort of folk, and we don't take ourselves too seriously", which is neither content, nor decoration. It sets a mood.
Any hooks we can provide to help users decide how much of these 'lesser' text alternatives they consume will be useful.
It has occurred to me that a combination of null alt (or null aria-label
) with a non-null aria-description
might be used to indicate a decorative image unambiguously. This would not require much change in the spec, maybe little more than an APG example, but the AT vendors would need to be on board.
Otherwise aria-something="decorative"
or aria-something="connotative"
seem viable (for some value of 'something') with the text alternative provided as a description, not a label.
BTW I agree with @chlane that these semantics should be available for videos and animations, even audio, hence an attribute, rather than a role.
Hi everyone,
I’ve discussed this topic internally with our company teams. I'll use "decorative but with meaning" images to define this kind of images. We've identified pros and cons:
so AT can allow users to decide if they want to interact with these images or not.
It's not clear if AT should provide an option to enable/disable this feature. If that's true, another risk is that AT users always activate it to relieving author/dev mistakes, making the page verbose without a real need. In addition, similarly to point 4, it won't be neither an accessible name, nor a description into the accessibility tree computation.
I have asked this question also to our user testing group (all members of the disability community), using a decorative/marketing/emotional image without a real meaning within the page. Answers:
DN: In my opinion the image description does not enhance or add anything for me. I think there are instances where the description would be nice, and enhance the experience. I think it is very subjective though, and many users are just going to want the meaningful information only.
M: This idea might be interesting for proficient and advanced users, but a new thing to learn for others. Coming from a person who is totally blind any sort of feedback from a website is good. Do you have anything like this already? If possible I’d like to try it out to give you my full opinion on the matter.
Quick consideration and comment on M's feedback: blind users are not aware about the high number of decorative images available within a website, because they are simply ignored by assistive technologies. The user's request to try something ready is interesting. In addition this solution might be good in a perfect world, but I'm not sure what will happen with current overall poor-knowledge.
Last, but no least, the complexity in navigating web pages using a screen reader, especially considering that the majority of websites are not WCAG conforming, is higher than expected, resulting in very high task completion times compared to a "mainstream" navigation. Do we really want to include more information, considering that the majority of visual impaired users usually skips decorative images? Or it will do more harm than good?
As discussed in the ARIA call this morning, it's almost like a hint for verbosity priority... E.g. Never read this if my SR verbosity is set to low or medium, but if it's high, or if I've landed on this in a non-linear context like touch exploration, this may/could be spoken or brailled.
Separate from that, I think the terms "decorative" and "presentational" have too much baggage associated with them. If the feature is needed, it should use separate terms that have no relational history to the concept: "totally devoid of meaning."
Propose a joint session with APA / WAI-ADAPT at TPAC
Discussion in the last WAI Coordination Call: https://www.w3.org/2022/06/29-waicc-minutes.html#item03
Description of bug or feature request
Creating this issue to start up a conversation relating to one of the proposed solutions to https://github.com/w3c/html-aam/issues/404.
Presently the importance of images is treated as an odd boolean where authors either need to decide (or are told) that certain images are important to convey to AT, while others are decorative and can be treated as if they were hidden. This need to markup an image as 'informative or decorative' essentially means that authors are telling users of AT what is important for them to know about, and doesn't take into account that some users may want to know what these decorative images represent.
However, if there were a role (or other
aria-*
attribute... whichever tbh) that could be used to indicate that an image with alternative text is available to AT, but has also been explicitly marked as decorative, so AT can allow users to decide if they want to interact with these images or not.As mentioned, this could then be a way to resolve the above mentioned HTML AAM issue, where an author has specified an image as having a null
alt
- the long standing indicator that an image is decorative - but also provided atitle
, indicating that there is some level of information available, but is either an author error in how the image should have been marked up, or is communicating potentially nice to have (or nonsense) information that users should be able to decide if they want to make it discoverable, or not.Will this require a change to CORE-AAM?
It will if this proposal gets any traction.
Will this require a change to the ARIA authoring guide?
It will if this proposal gets any traction.
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