fix: make image modal keyboard accessible

[chinmayee5599]

Summary

Fixes #1258.

• Wrap Markdown images in a native button for keyboard accessibility.
• Support Enter and Space through native button behavior.
• Move focus to the modal close button when the modal opens.
• Trap keyboard focus within the modal.
• Restore focus to the triggering image when the modal closes.
• Preserve the image's alt text and existing modal behavior.
• Add a small CSS reset for the image trigger button.

Testing

• Verified Enter opens the image modal.
• Verified Space opens the image modal.
• Verified Tab and Shift+Tab remain within the modal.
• Verified Escape closes the modal.
• Verified focus returns to the triggering image.
• Ran git diff --check.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Accessibility

  • Image triggers are keyboard-operable buttons with an accessible “Expand image” label.
  • Image previews use the image’s alt text, or “Image preview” when no alt text is available.
  • Improved focus management, including focus return and keyboard trapping.

• Bug Fixes

  • Improved modal behavior when opening, closing, and clicking the background.
  • Image previews use the browser’s current image source when available.

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📝 Walkthrough

The image render hook now wraps WebP and fallback images in accessible buttons and looks up image resources from the destination. The button styles reset its presentation. The modal uses “Image preview” when the image alt text is empty.

Changes: Image modal rendering and alt text

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Image lookup and button triggers layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html, assets/scss/_image-modal_project.scss	The render hook initializes values from its context and looks up the destination resource. It wraps WebP and fallback images in accessible buttons. The button styles reset spacing, borders, background, typography, color, and text alignment.
Modal alt text layouts/partials/image-modal.html	The modal uses “Image preview” when the image alt text is empty.

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Suggested reviewers: leecalcote

Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to 92e68

Keyboard users who open a raw image lose their place when the modal closes. Markdown images without a title no longer get the responsive image class. A Markdown image in SVG or another non-raster format can break the site build. Address these before merging.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely identifies the main change: improving keyboard accessibility for the image modal.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	The changes satisfy the coding objectives in [#1258]. Markdown images use native .md__image-trigger buttons. The nested images retain alt text. Native button activation supports Enter and Space. `…
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	The changed templates, modal script, and trigger CSS directly support [#1258]. The resource lookup and linked-image handling support preservation of existing image behavior. No unrelated change is dem…
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…

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Actionable comments posted: 1

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Inline comments:
In `@layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html`:
- Line 9: The image trigger and modal preview must preserve the Markdown
alternative text. In layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html at lines 9-9,
update the trigger aria-label to include .Text with an empty-text fallback; in
layouts/partials/image-modal.html at lines 48-48, assign image.alt to
modalPic.alt when opening the modal.

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Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between f56fc49 and 610f8e3.

📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• assets/scss/_image-modal_project.scss
• layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html
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[coderabbitai]

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@chinmayee5599 Thanks for the update. The image trigger and modal preview now preserve the Markdown image alternative text.

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[chinmayee5599]

Thanks @leecalcote for the review! I incorporated the feedback by preserving the Markdown image alternative text in both states. The image trigger now includes the source .Text in its aria-label, and the modal preview receives the original image's alt text when opened. These changes are included in the latest commit.

[chinmayee5599]

Thanks @coderabbitai for the review! Addressed this feedback in the latest commit. The image trigger now preserves the Markdown alternative text in its accessible label, and the modal preview preserves the original image's alt text.

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@chinmayee5599 Thanks for the update. The fix addresses the alternative-text preservation requirement for both the image trigger and the modal preview.

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[jijillery]

Muse Code review: solid accessibility fix — native button trigger, dialog semantics, focus trap, and focus restore all look correct. Verified against master: the three touched files still match the diff base, issue #1258 is still open, checks pass (3 passed, 1 skipped Copilot handler), and the only in-repo openModal(string) caller was render-image.html itself, so dropping the string-id overload is safe within this atomic change. A few findings below, one behavior change worth confirming.

1. Behavior change: raw-HTML <img> content no longer opens the modal (please confirm intentional)

layouts/partials/image-modal.html (~line 111-124): the old DOMContentLoaded handler wired every <img> with a data-modal="false" opt-out (used today by navbar.html, footer.html, feature-info.html, video.html), but the new code only wires .md__image-trigger. Raw-HTML <img> tags in content (52 files under content/) will silently stop opening the modal, and data-modal="false" becomes dead markup. If the narrowing to Markdown images is intentional, consider removing the now-dead data-modal attributes or noting it in the PR description. If not, keep a generic fallback:

  imageTriggers.forEach(function (trigger) {
    trigger.addEventListener("click", function () {
      var image = trigger.querySelector("img");

      if (image) {
        openModal(image);
      }
    });
  });

  document.querySelectorAll("img:not(.md__image-trigger img)").forEach(function (img) {
    if (img.dataset.modal === "false" || img.closest("#myModal")) {
      return;
    }
    img.addEventListener("click", function () {
      openModal(img);
    });
  });

Note this fallback path would set modalTrigger to null (no .closest() match), so focus restore is skipped there — acceptable, but worth knowing.

2. Possible double announcement: button aria-label + child img alt

layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html (~line 6-16): the button's accessible name comes from aria-label="Expand image: <alt>" while the child image keeps alt="<alt>". Since aria-label overrides but does not hide descendants, screen readers may announce both the button name and the nested image ("Expand image: foo, button, image foo"). Consider deriving the button name from its content instead, which avoids the duplication:

  <button
    type="button"
    class="md__image-trigger"
  >
    <img
      src="{{ .Destination | safeURL }}"
      alt="Expand image{{ with .Text }}: {{ . }}{{ end }}"
      class="md-image-responsive{{ with .Title }} {{ . }}{{ end }}"
    />
  </button>

If you prefer keeping the current shape (image alt preserved verbatim), that's defensible too — just calling it out.

3. Small robustness nits in image-modal.html

• (~line 49) Empty-alt images blank the preview's fallback text: modalPic.alt = image.alt overwrites the "Image preview" default with "". Suggest modalPic.alt = image.alt || "Image preview";
• (~line 52) closeButton.focus() assumes the query hit: suggest if (closeButton) { closeButton.focus(); }.
• (~line 48-50) These three lines lost their indentation (modalPic.src / modalPic.alt / modal.style.display) — re-indent to two spaces.
• Both render-image.html and image-modal.html are missing trailing newlines (diff shows \ No newline at end of file) — please add them.

4. Non-issues I checked (no action needed)

• Focus trap handles the single-focusable-element case correctly (Tab wraps close button to itself); Escape now only fires when open; backdrop click uses event.target === modal so the inner modalPic click still closes via its inline handler.
• The .md__image-trigger CSS reset preserves the default focus outline (it never strips outline), so keyboard focus stays visible; img inside is already display: block via _styles_project.scss, so no inline-gap issue.
• currentSrc || src plus the # hash-strip preserves prior behavior for responsive/anchored URLs.

[hiyach28]

Thanks for picking this up. I just have a few points

1. Conflicts with master. render-image.html and image-modal.html both changed in #1259, which now renders Markdown images as with a WebP source and the original as the fallback. Please rebase and wrap the in the trigger, rather than a bare , so the WebP output and the width/height attributes are kept.

2. Alt text is being rewritten, not preserved. At the head commit the image renders with alt="Expand image: {{ .Text }}", and there is no aria-label on the trigger. On a full build this changes the alt on all 380 Markdown images, and the modal copies the prefixed value. The 54 images with no description become alt="Expand image", and a broken image would show "Expand image: …" as visible text. Could you keep alt="{{ .Text }}" exactly as authored, and name the control on the button instead, for example aria-label="Expand image{{ with .Text }}: {{ . }}{{ end }}"? The modal can then take the image's own alt unchanged.

3. Buttons nested inside links. 23 images on 3 pages are written as [![alt](src)](url), which now renders as <a> → <button> → <img>. That is invalid nesting, it gives keyboard users two tab stops per image, and click behavior differs between browsers. The render hook cannot see the surrounding link, so skipping or unwrapping triggers inside an at load time is probably the simplest fix. Affected: both Kubernetes request flow tutorials and exploring-kubernetes-cronjobs.

Smaller points:

• The 88 raw tags in content (44 inside ) still open on click but can't be reached by keyboard, just mention fixes Part of Issue in description instead!
• Please keep the upstream attribution comment in render-image.html.
• Clicking inside .modal-cont outside the image no longer closes the modal. Fine if intended, just flagging the change.

[leecalcote]

@chinmayee5599, thanks for working on this. Please take a moment to address the merge conflicts.

[chinmayee5599]

Thanks for the feedback! I’ve addressed the conflicts, preserved WebP, dimensions and alt text, handled linked images, kept the attribution, and updated the PR description with the raw scope and modal click behavior.

[coderabbitai]

Actionable comments posted: 2

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🤖 Prompt to fix review comments

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Inline comments:
In `@layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html`:
- Line 2: Update the image render hook to declare or initialize $img, $alt,
$dest, and $class before any references, using values from the render-hook
context where appropriate, so Hugo can parse the template successfully.

In `@layouts/partials/image-modal.html`:
- Around line 49-53: Resolve the merge conflict in the modal image setup by
removing all conflict-marker lines and retaining a single modalPic.alt
assignment, using the fallback “Image preview” when image.alt is absent. Keep
the surrounding modal behavior unchanged.

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only still-valid issues, skip the rest with a brief reason, keep changes
minimal, and validate.

Inline comments:
In `@layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html`:
- Line 3: Update the class composition in the image render hook so both img
elements retain the md-image-responsive class and append .Title when present,
rather than replacing the responsive class with the title.
- Line 4: In the image-rendering flow, guard the `.Process "webp q85"` call with
`reflect.IsImageResourceProcessable` for the resource returned by
`resources.Get`; when it is not processable, render the original image through
the existing fallback instead of attempting WebP processing.

In `@layouts/partials/image-modal.html`:
- Line 46: Update the modal focus tracking around modalTrigger so raw images
without a .md__image-trigger save the previously focused element as the fallback
focus target. Ensure closeModal restores focus to that saved element when no
button trigger exists.

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[ayanasarkar]

3 things are actually broken rn:

render-image.html — class is literally just {{ .Title }} now so untitled imgs lost md-image-responsive completely and titled ones lost the base class too. don't overwrite the class, append title to the base instead

same file — .Process "webp q85" fires unconditionally on whatever resources.Get finds. svg/heic/ico markdown img = hugo build just fails. gate it with reflect.IsImageResourceProcessable first

image-modal.html — modalTrigger = image.closest(".md__image-trigger") is null for the ~88 raw tags in content that aren't wrapped in the new button. so closeModal() has nothing to .focus() back to — hit escape after opening one of those and ur keyboard focus just vanishes

everything else checks out tho, would request changes on those 3 before merge

[chinmayee5599]

Hi @ayanasarkar, I’ve addressed the three requested changes in the latest commit:

Preserved the md-image-responsive class while appending the image title.
Guarded WebP processing with reflect.IsImageResourceProcessable.
Added fallback focus restoration for raw images when closing the modal.

Thank you for the detailed review!