See also the (kind of) related issue of the title not being separated from the rest of the content, as it could interact with what is decided for this present issue: Loading...
Where would this icon be placed in the box? Depending on its position, adding visible text can still be space efficient. I think the idea of using the Confluence style is good, but maybe we can change it slightly to fit a box header efficiently.
-1 for 2
+1 for 3
+0 for 1 since having visible labels next to icons can be important for people that are not tech savvy, but this is still a big improvement.
Sidenote: I’m currently working on expanding on the accessibility options from the user profile and this idea of ‘visible icon label’ could be an interesting toggle
Unrelated to the icons, but for assistive technologies, would it be enough to provide an aria role or different tag for the whole box? Something like an <aside> tag or provide a role="complementary".
Also +1 for 1 (yay, my first vote), but 2 is also feasible with proper css;
Yes, it’s enough for assistive technologies to just provide extra info as atributes.
However, for generic accessibility (and WCAG conformance), this is not enough since it does not help the users with partial vision. A lot of partial vision users do not use AT, just because they don’t know about it, it’s too complex for them or “I don’t need it I can still see”.
One rule of thumb I figured out regarding accessibility is that it’s best to keep what you ‘show’ in UIs the same between AT and visuals.