Generic selenium testing images

Question

With selenium can one run a test which check all images on a current page if they contain ALT attribute and report images not having it ?

Answer 1

Yes. The first thing you need to do is decide which selenium you want to use.

• You can use Selenium IDE, where a test consists of an HTML table.
• You can use Selenium RC, where you write a test in a programming language (eg. C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, etc).

The latter is a little more complex at first, but if you want real power, you will use that method.

Then, you'll need to learn how to find all the images on a page. //img is a good XPath query to use. For Xpath details, see w3schools, and especially this page.

Then you'll want to find images with an alt attribute: //img[@alt]

One approach would be to count how many images there are, and subtract the number with alt attributes.

Answer 2

You can also do this in WebDriver (soon to be Selenium 2). The following example is for TestNG/Java but other client languages are available.

List<WebElement> images = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//img[not(@alt)]"));
assertEquals(images.size(), 0);

For more feedback you could also use something like the following to output details of the images without alt attributes:

for(WebElement image : images) {
    System.out.println(image.getAttribute("src"));
}

Answer 3

We have a similar test but we grab the page's Html and parse out the images with a regular expression and then match on a second regular expression looking for the alt tag. I haven't done a speed test, but I think it might be faster than doing the Xpath route.