Proper use of ARIA heading role

I wonder if anyone knows if the aria role=heading can be used for non-text elements (such as images) as well?

For example:

<img alt="..." role="heading" aria-level="1">

Thanks in adva开发者_如何学编程nce.

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Why not just use...

<h1><img alt="..."></h1>

...instead? This would seem to have the same functionality, but avoids the issue of whether ARIA is even supported.

This would also be search-engine (SEO) friendly, in that a web crawler will know that the contents of the is being used as a heading and will treat it accordingly, while it is very unlikely to look at the aria attributes.