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Re: Forms as lists

for

From: Jason Kiss
Date: Sep 3, 2010 12:29AM

Interesting discussion.

Take the following text as an example.

When you apply, you will have to answer the following questions:

1. What is your name?
2. Why do you want to join our organization?
3. Are you currently employed?

If I were to mark this up as regular HTML text, I would certainly mark
up the three questions as a list, likely an ordered list.

If I were instead presenting these questions in a form, why wouldn't I
equally want to mark up these three questions using a list, ordered or
unordered? Isn't there a clear structural relationship between each
question and the form control provided for its answer? Can't this
relationship be identified by placing each question/answer pair within a
list item?

The <fieldset> element is for grouping "thematically related controls
and labels", so a <fieldset> around the list of three questions would
seem to be appropriate since together they form a thematic group,
namely, the three questions one needs to answer before applying.
Additionally, one might want to wrap the third question, which could
take "yes" and "no" radio buttons for the answer, in its own nested
<fieldset>.

What other semantic elements might be appropriate for identifying the
question and answer relationships in this example, and of the grouping
of three questions as a whole?

Bullets and other list item markers are often not applied for various
presentational reasons. This does not necessarily obviate their
structural list semantics. Part of the beauty of HTML is that we can
programmatically identify semantically related content by applying
appropriate structural elements, all the while presenting the content
visually in a number of different ways, be it for better or for worse.

Jason Kiss
accessibleculture.org

On 03/09/10 00:20, Kevin White wrote:
> That is pretty much the rationale that I adopt.
>
> It is good to get the input of other screenreader users as I only really had the one sample to draw upon. He did say much the same as others here have.
>
> I suppose I would question the inclusion of list items less if they were being visually represented as well, but they are not. The list bullet or list number is suppressed in all the examples I have seen of this. This suggests that these are not really lists, and the developers are not thinking of them as lists since they do not present them as lists. If screenreader users are saying that this simply adds clutter then drop them and use non-semantic elements such as div.
>
> Thanks
>
> Kevin
>
> On 2 Sep 2010, at 13:13, Steve Green wrote:
>
>> My rationale is F43: Failure of Success Criterion 1.3.1 due to using
>> structural markup in a way that does not represent relationships in the
>> content - http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/F43
>>
>> Unfortunately the WCAG focus almost entirely on the addition of appropriate
>> structural markup. Apart from F43 very little is said about the prevention
>> of superfluous or inappropriate structural markup. For instance we are
>> starting to see nonsense such as breadcrumbs being marked up as definition
>> lists or fieldsets around Submit buttons. F43 appears to be the only means
>> we have of fighting back against these things.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Steve
>>
>> Address list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
>