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There have been a number of discussions about situation where you have a head shot of a person with their name written beside it, or in a section that says something like "Biography of John Doe" and there is a headshot... example http://lassonde.yorku.ca/users/aijunan Some accessibility people say use null alt="" other say alt="headshot of John Doe" Others say alt="John Doe" or "photo of John Doe"... We should address this specific common use case of an image.
My personal opinion is that it should be alt="Photo of John Doe" or alt="head shot of John Doe" My reasons are: 1) I've spoken with several from the blind community about this, and there has been an aversion to the idea that they not be informed that there is a photo there. They want it to be discoverable.They don't want people to decide for them which content they should and shouldn't be able to discover. 2) it is not pure decoration, and therefore does not qualify under the alt"" exemption in WCAG 1.1.1 I know that there are some in the accessibility field that think it is redundant and chatty, so I think we should perhaps explore this and make recommendation.
There is a comment in bug 22373 by Mallory that addresses this bug. https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22373#c1 Here is a copy of that comment for easier access. "Regarding the alternative text mentioning what type of image it is.. there's some limited data from the WebAIM survey http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/#images under "Identification of photos". It states a general preference of survey takers to know that the photo image is specifically a photo."
Another possibility authors may want to use to reduce verbosity...? <img src="headshot.jpg" alt="Profile photo: " aria-describedby="jdoe"> ... <htmltag id="jdoe">John Doe</htmltag> Though I'm unsure about implementation when users call up by type (all images on page) or unfocusables. Reminds me of the "how to programmatically link figcaptions to figures?" discussion, except here it must be author responsibility, not vendor.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Accepted Change Description: refer to commit https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/5a8abca8892b7150faeb6b627303446b248f14e1 Rationale: agree with commenter. This type of image i believe falls under 4.7.1.1.7 Images that enhance the themes or subject matter of the page content and have added an example there http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/embedded-content.html#images-that-enhance-the-themes-or-subject-matter-of-the-page-content
Yes this is fine Steve Just take the extra space (typo)out after the closing bracket
oops... there is no extra space, just a visual characteristic of courier font