WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Form input label question

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Dec 1, 2009 6:50PM

> This is yet another example of automated tools inventing 'rules' that don't
> actually exist. The 'rule' in question may or may not be good practice in
> some circumstances, but these tools really should differentiate between
> genuine non-compliances and their made-up rules.

Seems that an evaluation tool that claims that an input with type="hidden" needs a label is not implementing sufficiently intelligent rules. I know that this has been a problem in the past with some tools, but am not sure how much of an issue it is now.

It might make sense to check for input elements with type="hidden" that do have labels and fire a warning. The risk is that there is extraneous text on the page that may affect the way the page is read. I'd say that WCAG 2.0's 1.3.2 (meaningful sequence) could come into play here, but that might be a stretch.

AWK