Deprecate 46ca7f (Element marked as decorative is not exposed)

[tombrunet]

We started looking into this due to Fail 2 on 46ca7f (See related issue in the other repo: w3c/wcag-act-rules#295)

Fail 2 from https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/act/rules/46ca7f/ is no longer supported by any standards after changes in https://www.w3.org/TR/html-aria/ clarified the img to role mappings to be based on whether or not it has an accessible name rather than based on alt attribute.

The decorative concepts that are the foundation of 46ca7f are no longer supported due to spec changes. Additionally, the browsers seem to all handle conflict resolution correctly now, seeming to invalidate the accessibility supports notes.

There is a PR that should introduce a rule that should be more accurate: #2195

[dan-tripp-siteimprove]

We (Giacomo, Carlos, and I) discussed this in the office hours today. We think that there are really two intentions behind this rule: 1) conflict resolution and 2) "mismatching intentions". We got the wording of (2) from the background of the rule. (1) is (or will be) handled better by #2195 but (2) is not.

The rule is not mapping to WCAG so tool vendors have leeway in whether and how to flag this to their users (violations, warning, or nothing).

[giacomo-petri]

Resuming this conversation... ARIA in HTML now says:

If the img has an empty alt (alt="") and lacks any other img naming methods:
role=none, role=presentation

so, we should simply remove the example OR update the obsolete definition of marked as decorative

[dan-tripp-siteimprove]

so, we should simply remove the example OR update the obsolete definition of marked as decorative

I'm for "update the obsolete definition". As part of that update, it should probably be renamed too, from "marked as decorative" to something like "has mismatching decorative intentions".

[shunguoy]

I'm for "simply remove the example". This test case is "marked as decorative" by using alt="". Per ARIA in HTML spec, the role for the element is "none" or "presentation" and the use of an aria-labelledby is invalid per ARIA spec. If the aria-labelledby is removed, then it's just a Pass example.
A similar issue exists with Fail 3 where the use of aria-label is invalid for the element with the role='none' too.

[shunguoy]

The "conflict resolution" is what a user agent should do if a conflict happens. The ACT rules aim to identify and report such conflict (so the author can fix it and user agents don't need to handle such conflict, which might lead to inconsistency). The ACT rules should not depend on "conflict resolution".
In general, the ACT rules should not depend on browser results to make the determination, with the exception of new features or changes from spec (e.g., CSS, ARIA, WCAG) which a browser may not well support yet.

[carlosapaduarte]

CG decided against deprecating the rule. Closing the issue.