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Re: Default, place-holding characters

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From: Karthik Narayanan. R
Date: Feb 16, 2002 4:05PM

Hello Jean,
Jeff Johnson, I think in his book "GUI Bloopers" mentions that radio buttons should be used when the user 'has' to select from a number of options and can't leave something blank. If there is a situation where none of the options are to be selected check boxes can be used. I am sure you had a scenario in mind when you made this statement. It would be nice to know the exact scenario, so that people can suggest workarounds, or may be even regrouping the choices.

In my opinion, the default value might help in some cases, and not always as u have mentioned.
One useful example i can think up of is a page in Wachovia's online banking application, which have dates as default values in text fields when displaying the statement history. it is convinient and faster to use it that way than to have a menu for selecting the dates for which you would like to see the statements.
Regards,
KArthik

----- Original Message -----
From: Jean Watkins
To: WebAIM accessibility forum
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2002 11:34 AM
Subject: Default, place-holding characters


This piece about the place-holding characters came up a little last week. If you include the place holders in a text field, the user then has to delete the default information out before placing their own information in to the field. This doesn't seem very helpful to me. In some cases, can I provide a value of " " or would that create a new problem? Doesn't the text preceding the field explain what is wanted in the field?

The guidelines also say that a radio button must be selected to satisfy this requirement. What if a user has to select either apples or oranges, but doesn't want either one? In some cases, I do not have a radio button selected because the user may not want anything in that catego