Ok let me clarify a few points here. The whole problem in ICE-8358 / ICE-8821 is rotating around Web 508 compliance. Web 508 compliant page is a page that can be accessed by people with disabilities. Basically, technology is accessible if it can be used as effectively by people with disabilities as by those without. This doesn't mean that a blind user will complete a task on a web site as fast as one who can see. Listening takes longer than looking at the screen and reading. But the processes must be comparable. Therefore one of the 508 requirements is that a web page must use alternative text for images & headings on your page.
So in a markup like this:
<ice:panelTabSet>
<ice:panelTab id="activeExceptionsTabId" title="Active Exceptions">
<f:facet name="label">
<h:graphicImage value="/resources/images/LightBulbOn.png" alt="home" id="homeId" height="16" width="16"/>
</f:facet>
<h:outputText value="Test" />
</ice:panelTab>
</ice:panelTabSet>
It is a developer responsibility to provide alternative text to the components like:
<h:graphicImage value="/resources/images/LightBulbOn.png" alt="home" id="homeId" height="16" width="16"/>
And it is our responsibility to provide the same for our own images in different skins for components like ice:panelTab or ice:dataTable.
I believe the whole confusion in both JIRAs were due to the misinterpretation of the phrase "missing alt attribute". I also hope that it is now clear what we suppose to accomplish in this ticket.
Attached screen shot showing issue