Attached screen shot showing issue

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.

This seems to be a confusing issue. Essentially, Chrome represents alt="" as just alt. But, further investigation of the network traffic shows the empty string, as is also reported by Firefox Firebug.

As well, there was confusion as to why this is an empty string, and whether that is really 508 compliant, but this behaviour was recommended and requested by customers years quite a while ago, for their compliance.

The customer issue is that we are now rendering out alt="" for the spacer.gif, but they would prefer that text be included. So I would suggest that we change it so that alt="spacer" instead of alt="".

Upon further review, we no longer believe it is advantageous to provide "alt" attribute text to the spacer images. The reason for this is that the text would be essentially meaningless ("spacer"), as the images themselves are used for visual layout purposes and thus have no structural meaning. If we added alt text to the images, the alt text would appear as a tooltip popup for anyone using a browser that hovered over the images, which is a very negative side-effect. In addition, for a visually disabled person using a screen-reader to navigate the page, there is no use for them to even know the spacer images exist, so adding alt text in this case would actually be detrimental to their navigation of the page.

For these reasons marking this as "Won't Fix".