Code review comment for lp:~adeuring/launchpad/bug-513382

Hi Edwin, hi Michael,

My reason to use the plain <img> tag is accessibility. See for example http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#text-equiv : "Non-text Content: All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose, except for the situations listed below. (Level A)"

<span class="sprite person" title="whatever"></span> is perhaps an alternative, but the main idea of the <img> tag's alt attribute is to provide a precise description of what is displayed ("3 out of 4 heat flames" in this case, which is quite precise).

The title attribute, on the other hand, should "offer advisory information about the element for which it is set" (http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/global.html#adef-title), which is slightly different.

Regarding accessibility, textual content that is hidden via CSS does not work at all as a an alternative for <img alt="...">: Screen readers and similar technology are supposed to present the _visible_ content in some other form, but not the invisible content.

So I think we should keep the <img> tag in this case.