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Linked Text Image Violating WCAG's 1.4.5?l

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From: Peter Shikli
Date: Aug 17, 2017 4:14PM

Understaing WCAG 2.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/ states
that unless the use of text in an image is essential to the information
being conveyed, as with text in a logo, text should be used to convey the
information instead of image of text. Specifically, it says that, "If an
author can use text to achieve the same visual effect, he or she should
present the information as text rather than using an image."

In "Examples of Success Criterion 1.4.5", the document discusses
navigation items. It says that the navigational links can have both an icon
and text to describe the target of the links and then describes a CSS
technique for achieving this. I can see WebAIM's menu bar works like this,
as does ours.

The clarification I need is this: Does this mean that an image with text,
such as "About us" linking to an "about us" webpage, must be rendered as
text, not as an image? Common practice is to use an image including the
text "About us" with an alt="About Us" attribute and nest the image in the
link element. Are we to tell all these webmasters that their linked images
with text are WCAG 2.0 violations?

If not, how do we avoid a WCAG 2.0 violation since that is what the above
words seem to say?