Question about object-alt issue when used with NodeJs & JSDOM

[nolandanley]

Product

axe-core

Question

I'm using axe-core with NodeJS and JSDOM (see this issue for more background) and noticed an issue when running object-alt. I get the error TypeError: range.getClientRects is not a function - feature unsupported in your environment. Skipping object-alt rule. I assume this is from my environment being a virtual DOM.

I looked up where this was happening and found object-is-loaded-matches.js which was added in Oct 2022 and seems to only be used for object-alt. There seems to be a param documented for a virtual node (currently line 10) but I don't see one being provided or used. Is there some way this could be fixed to allow me to run this rule on a virtual DOM like JSDOM, or am I not doing something I need to on my end to run this correctly?

Recreated with the example violative code found at https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.7/object-alt.

Thanks in advance for any context or help you can provide!

[straker]

That's an interesting question. The reason we added the matcher was to ensure we don't run the rule on objects that don't have content that is loaded. Since there wasn't a way to test for that we had to rely on a small hack to check (that is, testing the text content to see if there's no text).

I'll have to ask @WilcoFiers to see if running the rule on JSDOM environments make sense if we can't test for loaded content.

[WilcoFiers]

I think it makes sense to just work around this. If we're in a JSDOM env, assume the object will load and then run the rule. We should probably also figure out how we can better anticipate problems like that. We have a test suite that runs all rules. Perhaps we need to run a similar thing in JSDOM?