Images of text definition on "significant content" is vague; also link to text definition should not exist!

[mbgower]

A new ACT rule attempts to determine if Images of Text has passed.

However, the definition of Images of Text in WCAG 2.x contains the following note:

This does not include text that is part of a picture that contains significant other visual content.

"Significant other visual content" is a very unspecific phrase. As we move to WCAG 3.0, such a phrase does not lend itself to developing a computational assessment.

The ACT rule's tactic is to check if the text is "not the most significant content". This is not very much of an improvement -- and arguably not precisely equivalent to the note in the definition.

Passed Example 4
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This image resource referenced by the object element contains text, but it is not the most significant content.

What would be more useful is to provide computationally testable ways of determining when text that is not central to an image can be ignored.

[mbgower]

Suggested wording could include:

This does not include text that appears in an image but is incidental to the image's purpose or function. For example, if the text was hypothetically removed from the image and the image's primary meaning would not be altered, the text would be incidental.

[mbgower]

In WCAG 3.0, it could be altered even more to be

This does not include text in an image where the majority of the image content is something other than text.

That should still meet the main point of Images of Text, yet most users should be able to rapidly assess that, and an actual calculation of pixels would help decide the edge cases.

[mbgower]

Actually, there is another problem in this definition and that is that text in the note links to this definition of text:

sequence of characters that can be programmatically determined, where the sequence is expressing something in human language

As it stands right now, any image that contains text would pass this, since none of it is programmatically determinable.

That link to the definition of text should be removed!

[bruce-usab]

@mbgower you may be correct about the link to the definition, but I am not sure.

Are you keeping in mind that definition (exception?) also covers incidental text in a photograph.

[mbgower]

@bruce-usab The concern on the vague language remains, but not the use of a "text" definition link.

The link in the definition note was removed as part of #3038