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Re: form label question

for

From: Moore, Michael
Date: Aug 8, 2007 7:50AM

On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Kathleen Ballard wrote:

> Also, a recent webinar mentioned using the alt or title attribute of
> the form control itself.

Jukka replied:

That's pointless or worse. If you have good labels, nobody needs such
attributes. If you don't, most people won't perceive any labels.

Mike Moore's response:

Sorry to disagree Jukka, but the title attribute is very helpful to one
group of assistive technology users that I know of. Screen
magnification users, specifically ZoomText. The speech engine included
with ZoomText does not reliably report labels, even when properly marked
up using the for and id attributes. We have tested this using the most
recent versions, ZoomText 9.0 and ZoomText 9.1. The reader in ZoomText
will report the title. Thus adding a title that matches the label does
add value for at least one group of users.

JAWS will also reliably report the content of the title attribute if the
label attribute is missing or broken. We have been experimenting with a
method of taking advantage of that behavior to improve reporting of
intervening text including instructions or questions that apply to
multiple inputs. We purposely do not use the label element on the first
form input following the instruction or question and place the
instruction/question and the first response within the title attribute
of the next form input. Code example follows:

<p>What is your favorite color?</p>
<input type="radio" title="What is your favorite color? Red." ... />Red
<input type="radio" title="Blue" id="blue" ... /><label
for="blue">Blue</label>
<input type="radio" title="Green" id="green" ... /><label
for="green">Green</label>
...

This method provides some advantages over other methods that we have
tried for accomplishing the same task. If fieldsets and legends are
used, JAWS may not report the legend if the user has selected "advanced"
in their verbosity settings on the utilitity manager. Additionally if
JAWS reports the legend, it will reread it for every input within the
fieldset. Next, JAWS will only read the legend that is closest to the
input, thus no nested fieldsets/legends to add instructions. Finally,
the ZoomText reader does not report legends at all.

There are also disadvantages to this method:
1. It is not proper semantic structural markup (Web Standards issue)
2. Form inputs with only the title defined will fail automated
accessibility testers.
3. It has only been confirmed to work with JAWS 6.1 and above. We have
not tested with other screen readers.
4. There are character limits governing how much text will be read from
a title attribute.

We are also beginning some experiments with using 1px transparent gifs
with the alt attribute defined within the label element to resolve the
intervening text (Instructions/questions covering groups of inputs)
issue for JAWS users. I will let everyone know how those experiments
come out the next time this issue is raised on this list.

m