WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Label tags again

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jul 16, 2010 10:03AM

On 16/07/2010 16:51, Ken Weavers wrote:
> Could I just check if there are any other advantages of the Label tag? I set
> up two fields, one with a Label tag, one without, and as expected only the
> former caused focus to move to the field. But I was surprised that the
> assistive software spoke the words of the descriptor in both cases in the
> same way, whether there was a Label tag or not.

When there's no explicit label, screenreaders/AT will use heuristics and
in most cases read the text that's directly preceding an input/control.
In some situations (if your text isn't directly adjacent to the input in
your markup - maybe you're doing extra stuff like a help link at the end
of the text or similar) this can fall flat on its face.

In general, it's better (to avoid any potential problems, or different
heuristics coded into the different SRs/ATs) to just go with explicit
labels.

> So this does not appear to
> be an advantage, though not a disadvantage either, obviously.
>
> If there are any other major advantages, I would like to check that the
> web-page takes those advantages, to confirm that the coding of the tags is
> optimum.


P
--
Patrick H. Lauke