Text Detectable
Group: text-and-wording • Guideline: text-to-speech
Summary in Plain English
Every piece of text a sighted user can see has an equivalent that software can read - including text inside images and drawn onto a canvas. The exception is where providing it would duplicate text already present in the view.
Why It Matters
Text baked into an image or drawn on a canvas cannot be read aloud, enlarged, recoloured or translated. The programmatic equivalent is what restores all of those.
Scope: When This Applies
The draft's own conditions, quoted from guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/text-to-speech/text-detectable.md.
Except when
- making visible text programmatically determinable would lead to duplication within the view.
Test Procedure from the W3C Draft
Quoted from the provision's informative document, informative/guidelines/text-and-wording/text-to-speech/text-detectable.md. It is the group's own procedure, not an editorial testing guide.
Procedure For all visible text:
- If the text is embedded in an image, check that the text has a text alternative or can be accurately read using the accessibility support set.
- If text content, check that the text is not hidden using code such as the
aria-hiddenattribute.
Expected results
- #1 and #2 are true.
W3C Working Group Status
The draft records no open editors' notes on this provision.
W3C Threads on This Provision
4 GitHub threads carrying 15 comments, fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.
⚠️ This summary is stale — comments landed after it was written.
What the Argument Is About
Three loosely connected threads, none of them a live argument: a long-dormant 2019-2020 debate about whether SVG text counts as an image of text, plus two unanswered proposals about where detectable text belongs and how far it goes.
Positions taken in the thread
patrickhlauke opened #190 arguing that although SVG contains real text elements and so passes the normative definition of images of text, no user agent lets a user change the font, size or colour of that text, which is the whole point of the criterion. alastc agrees the intent is not met and proposes a split: if the text's size, position and colour must be relative to its surroundings, as in a graph or infographic, it meets the "particular visual effect" carve-out; otherwise it fails. He puts the colour half at user agents and treats the font and spacing half as inherent to SVG's purpose.
Walks the criterion property by property and finds browser zoom, font size, font family, letter spacing and word spacing all work in SVG, with line-height and paragraph spacing the only genuine gaps. Argues those were not required until WCAG 2.1's 1.4.12, which only forbids preventing adaptation rather than requiring the author to offer it, so SVG text should not be held to a higher bar. Later narrows this after testing goodwitch's examples: he would only pass an SVG that inherits the document's colours, because adjusting fill values per graphic demands CSS expertise and time most users do not have.
Built three CodePen examples and concluded that SVG with text passes, SVG with path-drawn text fails, and an svg file loaded via img fails. Pushes back on JAWS-test that High Contrast Mode is not named in the normative text and the criterion nowhere says customisation must be easy, so on a strict normative reading this has to pass. Asks AGWG to make a ruling so the industry is consistent, and suggests the real fix belongs in a WCAG 2.x release or Silver.
Reports in #202 that the text-to-speech subgroup could find nothing specific to text-to-speech devices that a screen reader would not also cover, and proposes moving Detectable text out of Clear meaning into the Text-to-speech section to replace the Text-to-speech supported requirement. Also asks whether "text-to-speech" names the technology or the capability, suggesting a rename such as "Text as speech" if the latter, and where user-agent and TTS developer guidance would live in WCAG 3. No one has replied.
In #537, calls the provision a step in the right direction that stops short: text that is programmatically determinable but cannot be selected breaks select-to-speak. Also flags possible redundancy with the copying-supported part of "Avoid exclusionary cognitive tasks" and suggests the two may be better combined or regrouped. Unanswered.
Agreed
- Line-height and paragraph spacing are the properties SVG genuinely cannot expose to CSS adjustment; JAWS-test's inventory of the rest was not contested by others, though JAWS-test later added that changing font size or font via user style risks clipping text, because the background objects and graphics do not scale.
- Text drawn as SVG paths rather than text elements fails, which nobody disputed.
Still open
- Whether SVG text passes on a strict normative reading or fails on intent. goodwitch asked AGWG for a ruling in 2020 and none is recorded in the thread.
- Whether High Contrast Mode counts as a form of setting colour and background — JAWS-test raised it and expected most of the group to say no.
- shawnthompson's proposal in #202 to relocate Detectable text under Text-to-speech, and the naming question behind it.
- sydneycolemanfromgoogle's point in #537 that selectability, not just programmatic determinability, is what select-to-speak needs.
Note
Issue #190 is a WCAG 2.x-era discussion from 2019-2020 that has drawn no comment since, now carried forward under this provision's label. The two WCAG 3-era issues, #202 and #537, are both single unanswered comments.
- #190 1.4.5 / 1.4.9 Image of Text and <text> inside SVGs open 6 comments · updated 2026-05-02
- #202 Requirements: Text-to-speech supported open 0 comments · updated 2026-05-02
- #537 Text-to-speech - Text detectable open 0 comments · updated 2026-03-27
- #744 Update the definition of text open 9 comments · updated 2026-10-23
WCAG 2.2 Criteria That Map Here
From this site's reviewed WCAG 2.2 → WCAG 3 map. The map is an interpretation, not a W3C mapping: W3C has not published one yet.
No mapping recorded. No WCAG 2.2 criterion in this site's map is recorded as a predecessor of this provision.
Related WCAG 2.2 criteria
On a neighbouring subject, but this provision doesn't replace them.
W3C Raw Source Text
Verbatim from guidelines/groups/text-and-wording/text-to-speech/text-detectable.md · informative document: informative/guidelines/text-and-wording/text-to-speech/text-detectable.md
All visible text has a programmatically determinable equivalent. :::except-when * making visible text programmatically determinable would lead to duplication within the view. :::