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Re: forms, tab order, and "cancel" buttons

for

From: Margit Link-Rodrigue
Date: Dec 9, 2009 11:27AM

I don't agree that having the cancel button to the left is a layout
standard. I just consulted Luke Wroblewski's book Web Form Design and the
Chapter about form actions clearly has primary actions located to the left
and secondary actions, if visible at all, to the right. He also includes
graphics that show the eye fixations of users during form completion, if you
want to get scientific.If your web designer is quoting standards, what are
the specific sources? Maybe you can get a copy of Luke's book. He was lead
user interface designer for ebay and is now Chief Design Architect at
Yahoo!.

margit

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 11:56 AM, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> My organization is in the process of putting up a feedback form,
> for which I have provided the relevant information about
> accessibility (e.g. WAI-ARIA, tabindex, labels, etc.). One thing
> I mentioned about accessibility is that the "Cancel" button
> appears immediately to the left of the "Send feedback" button.
>
> To me, this is clearly problematic for keyboard users. Your tab
> index, for usability reasons, should match your layout with
> left-to-right reading in a case like this, which means that a
> casual keyboard user can easily tab to and select the "Cancel"
> button instead of the "Send feedback" button. But our web
> designer says that having "Cancel" to the left of "Send feedback"
> is standard design, and following general layout standards
> provides its own benefits for usability.
>
> How do people usually deal with this? A developer doesn't want to
> remove the "Cancel" button, because he doesn't want any data in
> the form to accidentally send on reload.
>
> -deborah
>