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Re: Label vs ALT tag on form elements

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Mar 21, 2007 11:00AM

On 3/21/07, Robert Yonaitis wrote:
> For section 508 N Labels are required if It is anything except for
> - Text / form element with nothing in between the preceding text and element

Do you have a reference for this? That's certainly not what the
language of Section 508 specifies. The Access Board may have some
supporting documentation that allows this, but I certainly would not
recommend leaving out the label just because the elements are adjacent
to each other or in some particular order. Doing so would also be a
violation of WCAG (of note, WCAG 2.0 requires explicit association
using for and id).

And to clarify, in HTML, alt is allowed only on img, area, applet, and
input. I had always thought that alt was only allowed on input
type="image", but this does not seem to be the case in the spec. In
any case, alt on any other type of input doesn't seem to do anything
in either browsers or assistive technologies. As such, the approach of
using alt on anything other than input type="image" seems a bit
pointless to me.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org