[community] An odd Chrome issue with ALT attributes, with implications for accessibility audits and AT

[Harnum, Alan]

I just opened this issue with the Chromium team after it surfaced in some of the auditing work done by the IDRC's WebSavvy team: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=708192 - sharing here in case others encounter it.

SHORT VERSION:

Given source image tag HTML such as '<img src="sunCat.jpg" alt="" />', recent builds of Chrome renders this as '<img src="sunCat.jpg" alt />' (disparity is easiest to see using the developer tools element inspector). This appears to happen on both Windows and Mac, and is also present on Safari on Mac.

IMPLICATIONS:

  *   Some AT combinations (VoiceOver + Chrome is one) will treat the image as having no ALT text, even though it has the correct WCAG "null alt text" approach for a purely decorative image.
  *   Inspecting rendered HTML for image tags may result in false positives for incorrect use of the ALT attribute. (the ALT attribute must have a value, even if it is blank)

Anyway, an odd issue that I haven't been able to find other reports on (aside from this tweet: https://twitter.com/thierrykoblentz/status/833756545703817216).

ALAN HARNUM
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

E aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto://aharnum@ocadu.ca>

OCAD UNIVERSITY
100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1W1
www.ocadu.ca<http://ocadu.ca/>