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

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 9, 2009 12:00PM

<EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> One thing
> I mentioned about accessibility is that the "Cancel" button
> appears immediately to the left of the "Send feedback" button.

It is very bad practice and does not become any better by its being so
common.

The same applies to the "Cancel" button, more properly called destruction
button, as a whole. See some good arguments by Jakob Nielsen, the usability
expert:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000416.html

The only situation where the destruction button could be useful is at the
_start_ of a form that will often be used several times in succession by a
user. He might want to wipe out all the content when starting to fill in
data about a new case. But even then, it is better that the form handler
returns, after feedback about succesful submission, a fresh page with an
empty form.

> To me, this is clearly problematic for keyboard users.

The problem is much wider. It is especially mouse users who accidentally hit
the destruction button. This is particularly frustrating after having
entered some long text directly. There is no way to get it back.

> But our web
> designer says that having "Cancel" to the left of "Send feedback"
> is standard design,

Only in the sense that cluelessness is standard design in many ways - people
just copy features without ever thinking why.

> 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.

It has nothing to do with such issues.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/