Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!

Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A Why is WAVE throwing an "empty button" error when there's a type attribute specified?

Running the WAVE browser extension on a site, I'm getting an "Empty button" error on a search submit box: A <button> element is present that contains no text content (or alternative text...

1 answer  ·  posted 8mo ago by Mithical‭  ·  last activity 8mo ago by Moshi‭

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Mithical‭ · 2023-09-05T11:27:47Z (8 months ago)
Why is WAVE throwing an "empty button" error when there's a type attribute specified?
Running the [WAVE browser extension](https://wave.webaim.org/) on a site, I'm getting an "Empty button" error on a search submit box:

![Page with a search box opened. A red WAVE error is showing under the search submit icon, and an explanation of the error and the relevant HTML code are visible on the page, both provided below.](https://powerusers.codidact.com/uploads/tke22dh6ce1iu04oaimsh72v26nq)

> A \<button\> element is present that contains no text content (or alternative text), or an \<input type="submit"\>, \<input type="button"\>, or \<input type="reset"\> has an empty or missing value attribute.

The HTML that's highlighted as being responsible for this error shows as this, including a "type=" attribute:

```
<button type="submit" class="button is-filled is-outlined">
<i class="fa fa-search"></i>
</button>
```

The [source code](https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/blob/develop/app/views/layouts/_header.html.erb#L148) in Ruby for this element is this:

```
  <%= form_tag search_path, method: :get, role: 'search' do %>
    <div class="grid is-nowrap">
        <%= search_field_tag :search, params[:search], class: 'form-element' %>
        <div class="h-m-1">
          <%= button_tag type: :submit, class: 'button is-filled is-outlined', name: nil do %>
            <i class="fa fa-search"></i>
          <% end %>
        </div>
    </div>
  <% end %>
```

On a development instance running on localhost, I tried adding `input_type: :submit` to the `button_tag`, which results in `input_type="submit" ` being added to the HTML, but I'm still getting the same WAVE error.

Why is WAVE giving me this error even though there is a `type` attribute (or `input_type` attribute) specified, and how can I resolve it?