WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Alternatives to LEGEND for a radio button?

for

From: D A
Date: Sep 8, 2009 9:00AM

> First off I'm not sure who decided that I as a screen reader need the
> "legend" tag. When I have used it in the past I found it annoying to
> be subjected to the same phrase in front of every option, be it radio
> button or checkbox, for example
>
> what is your favourite colour checkbox not checked blue
> what is your favourite colour checkbox not checked red
>  what is your favourite colour checkbox not checked green
> what is your favourite colour checkbox not checked yellow

This is exactly why I'd like to use a header to group the checkboxes
rather than a legend. Or, at least half of the reason.

But in terms of the larger group of form fields, Legend seems to be
the de-facto standard (both in terms of web standards and habit).

That said, if JAWS reads the header before each field, yea, I'd say
that'd be annoying, useless chatter.

So I guess that raises the question as to what is the culprit: Bad web
standards? Bad decision by Freedom Scientific? Verbose JAWS
preferences set by the user?

I agree that there needs to be pragmatic testing for accessibility, as
'standards' aren't any sort of magic bullet. That said, I'm also not a
fan of going against web standards because of one particular software
company's web browser (be it Microsoft, Freedom Scientific, or any
other particular developer).

I do appreciate the insights, though!

Geof, you mentioned the following:

> I just want the  form to be a form, not something cooked up to make
> it look good for the sighted or pass some suspect guideline and I
> want the least amount of chatter from JAWS. I dont want my form
> broken up by headings either. Then again maybe I'm asking to much.

In your opinion, how would you prefer that a group of checkboxes be
identified? For instance, if this were a list of checkboxes with
labels:

cheese
eggs
onions

How would you prefer they be grouped? It seems to me that there needs
to be some sort of way to identify those three form fields and their
labels as "Choose your omelet ingredients" but I'm not entirely sure
what I should be using mark-up wise to accomplish that. Legend seemed
like the standard answer per web standards but due to both visual
rendering and verbose audio rendering, it seems like the worst option.
An H2 sounds like it might be OK as it should only be read once. The
key is to make sure it *is* read at least once in most screen readers
(rather that skipped over when in forms mode).

-Darrel