The correct role to use is img
with aria-label
or aria-laelledby
. Here’s an example from the HTML Living Standard:
These features can be used to make accessibility tools render content to their users in more useful ways. For example, ASCII art, which is really an image, appears to be text, and in the absence of appropriate annotations would end up being rendered by screen readers as a very painful reading of lots of punctuation. Using the features described in this section, one can instead make the ATs skip the ASCII art and just read the caption:
<figure role="img" aria-labelledby="fish-caption"> <pre> o .'`/ ' / ( O .-'` ` `'-._ .') _/ (o) '. .' / ) ))) >< < `\ |_\ _.’ ‘. \ ‘-._ _ .-’ ‘.) jgs `\__\ </pre> <figcaption id="fish-caption"> Joan G. Stark, “<cite>fish</cite>“. October 1997. ASCII on electrons. 28×8. </figcaption> </figure>