244312 - broken images with empty alt text render a form unsubmittable

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Images, Video, and HTML Frames, defect)

Description

[Michael Newton]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a) Gecko/20040519 Firefox/0.8.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a) Gecko/20040519 Firefox/0.8.0+

If a form has an input element of type 'image' with an empty 'alt' attribute,
that element is not usable if a) the image is broken, or b) if images are
disabled.  It should treat an empty alt attribute the same as a missing alt
attribute.  See the test case for details.
I'd also suggest that the default alt text be made to look a bit like a button,
but that's another bug for another day.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Disable images
2. View a form with an empty alt attribute on an image button


Actual Results:  
No way to submit the form.

Expected Results:  
Should be treated the same as an image with a missing alt attribute.

Comment 1

[Michael Newton]

BTW I was hoping this wouldn't get lumped in with bug 41924 because it affects
form submission, and also because that bug seems destined never to be fixed :)

Comment 2

[Michael Newton]

If anyone listening (who is a C programmer, unlike myself) wants to have a look
at this, I think the relevant code is in
nsCSSFrameConstructor::GetAlternateTextFor which is at
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/layout/base/nsCSSFrameConstructor.cpp#10591

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Comment 4

[Michael Newton]

This is still broken! Reassigning to Layout:images. Maybe they can fix it?

Comment 5

[Phil Anderton]

Isn't this behaviour exactly what the author asked for? Setting the alt attribute to an empty string is common practice for the img element, so there's no surprise here. 

Comment 6

[Michael Newton]

W3C UA Accessibility Guidelines suggest two possible ways of dealing with this situation.  One is the current behaviour, the other is my proposed behaviour.  At least this should be WONTFIXed.

http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10-TECHS/guidelines.html#tech-null-alt