Back in January when I started looking into Atom and accessibility the
following exchange took place:
JS: atom:icon, atom:logo don't have title or type attributes
BS: <atom:title> and <atom:subtitle> could be considered the accessible
alternative for the icon and logo. Most modern accessibility guidelines
recommend against providing alternative text for logos and icons when that
alternative text would significantly duplicate content available elsewhere
in the document.
BS: A title attribute is a bad idea because human-readable text shouldn't
be represented with attributes. If it is needed then it should be a text
construct.
JS: True, however, while unlikely, the title and summary can each contain
complex markup. If accessibility guidelines were to suggest using those
elements as the alternate text for the icon/logo, then the guidelines
would need to suggest appropriate content restrictions for each or else
specify a processing model so markup can be dealt with appropriately.
BS: Right. Restrictions on titles and summaries are needed even for users
without disabilities, like we discussed a while back when we were debating
whether Atom processors should support HTML/XHTML content in titles.
I looked around a bit and couldn't find any uses of atom:icon or
atom:logo. In any event, if there is no valuable information conveyed by
the icon/logo such as when the information is unimportant or redundant
then it should not have "alt text". This is done on web pages with
Alt="".
Is it always the case that the icon/logo is only "eye candy" and that the
useful information is what is found in atom:title/subtitle? If that's the
case I don't see a need for any changes to atom:icon/logo.
Pete Brunet
IBM Accessibility Architecture and Development
11501 Burnet Road, MS 9022E004, Austin, TX 78758
Voice: (512) 838-4594, Cell: (512) 689-4155
Ionosphere: WS4G
