If your accessibility software gives up when it sees an image without an alt attribute, then I see that as an opportunity for improvement.
It's almost 2021. Accessibility software can use ML and OCR to provide a semblance of navigable semantics for visual-first media like images. See Project Naptha [1] for one such example of adding OCR-powered text detection to images encountered in your browser.
In the specific case of SVG, the text can already be fully semantically extracted with very little work.
> Accessibility software can use ML and OCR to provide a semblance of navigable semantics for visual-first media like images. See Project Naptha [1] for one such example of adding OCR-powered text detection to images encountered in your browser.
Hey, if we really work at it, I'm sure we can make it impossible for anyone to use the Web without sending all of their information to an untrusted third party who has every incentive to violate your privacy, but won't, because they say they won't.
> It's almost 2021.
Indeed. We should have gone a lot further down this slippery slope by now.
Just because the parent's example of in-browser OCR involves a SaaS API, doesn't mean in-browser OCR inherently has to involve a SaaS API. OCR runs just as well on your own computer. Heck, phones could run the original realtime WordLens software just fine, and that was 10 years ago.
(Offline) OCR models should really be everywhere now, just like offline speech-to-text models are. It's kind of surprising that it's not just "a thing" built into every OS.
This is not just about "text extraction", my whole point was that an alt text is not enough. An SVG document has a DOM and a navigatable accessibility tree just like HTML documents (including ARIA attributes etc). There is more that happens for sighted users too - text becomes selectable in the SVG, links are clickable, etc. All that probably needs the context of a browsing context and DOM created in an <iframe> or <object> and not in an <img> and is specced in detail. I really don't blame browsers for implementing the spec.
It's almost 2021. Accessibility software can use ML and OCR to provide a semblance of navigable semantics for visual-first media like images. See Project Naptha [1] for one such example of adding OCR-powered text detection to images encountered in your browser.
In the specific case of SVG, the text can already be fully semantically extracted with very little work.
1. https://projectnaptha.com/