WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Alternatives to LEGEND for a radio button?

for

From: Geof Collis
Date: Sep 8, 2009 10:45AM

Hi Darrel

In the case of radio buttons JAWS tells me how
many to choose from, checkboxes aren't but it is
just as easy to tab over them, out of JAWS mode
and hit the space bar to select which ones I
want. I personally just need text in front of the
list of items telling me to make my choice as follows:

1)What are your favourite foods,please check all that apply:
chees
eggs
onions

2)What are your favourite colours, please check all that apply:

blue
red
green

and so on.

It seems to me that forms are changing to the
point of being noisy, or too much information
that I dont need to hear, I'm of the mindset of
keeping it simple. Perhaps I'm alone on this but
I understand breaking up information into
paragraphs headings and lists but forms are
different because of the intricacy of them, it'd
be like anouncing a new paragraph or line everytime I read an article.

Having said that, if I had to choose the lesser
of 2 evils I'd use headings instead of legend.
I'm not aware that JAWS announces a heading the same way it does legend.

cheers

Geof






>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
>