Ektron CMS not saving image alt text?

Question

At our university, we use Ektron CMS 8.02 SP2 and we are trying to bring our site up to 508 compliance.

The editor does not save the image alt text in the xml after clicking the publish button. This is causing a problem on our site because we must have image alt text for all of our images on the site. For now, the alt text is defaulting to the image source, but even that is not being stored in the xml for the individual pages that we need to add the text to.

Is there anything we can do to resolve this?

Things I have tried:

1. Looking on Ektron's guide to using their (defunct) system.
2. Asking this question.

If at all possible, I would like to avoid editing the xml template, but if that is the only way to fix this, then let me know.

The purpose of this question is to find alternative ways to do this without editing the xml template.

Answer 1

The image field in a Smart Form can be configured two ways.

Option 1: Value is an element

<FieldName>
    <img src="{path}" alt="{text}" />
</FieldName>

In this case, the Image attributes are preserved.

Option 2: Value is plain text

<FieldName>{path}</FieldName>

In this case, only the path is stored as a plain text string.

Based on your description, I'd guess you're using Option 2 when you want Option 1.

See red outlined area here: