Dustin, one of my co-workers, ran into a problem accessing
the "alt" attribute on image buttons using Watir and discovered a useful
trick:

Who knows if this will ever be useful to anyone else, but I've been
trying to work with imageButtons, which have alt tags. In HTML they render as
<input type="image".../> I wanted to
access the alt tag of the image. ie.contains_text wouldn't find it for me.
Only image objects in watir have any knowledge of alt tags.  And
unfortunately, watir recognizes imageButtons, not as images, but as
buttons.

there is almost no documentation that covers this, but I found that even
though these are buttons, you can use image methods to manipulate these
'buttons'. For example, you can get the object with:

• button = $ie.button(:alt, "This is the alt
  text...") *alt is only exposed for images, but works for
  imageButtons.

And you can manipulate the buttons with image
methods, such as: