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Re: Do you need to have a label on a form field when it has a default value?

for

From: adam solomon
Date: Sep 13, 2010 12:03PM

I think we are talking about WCAG here, and you must have a label markup or
a title attribute. Yes, it is crucial. That is the accepted standard. It is
needed at the very least for screen readers. There is no greater confusion
for screen readers than a lack of appropriate markup.

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> William Lawrence wrote:
>
> > Default text in the value attribute implicitly labels the form input.
>
> No, it explicitly fills the input field with data that should be acceptable
> as actual input by many, or most, users. A typical example is prefilling a
> field with a person's name if it can be retrieved from a database on the
> basis of previous user actions.
>
> Using the initial (default) content for "labelling" or "clues" is just all
> wrong. Some accessibility-oriented people still believe in the grossly
> outdated (and, actually, even initially wrong) accessibility
> recommendations
> that say that all fields should have nonempty initial content. It's just as
> mad as it sounds, or actually worse.
>
> > Form input elements must always be explicitly labeled, either with a
> > label element or with the title attribute of the input element.
>
> That's just further confusion and has nothing to do with "default text".
>
> Every input field, except usually submit buttons (which explain themselves,
> or should do that), should have an explanatory label text before them.
> Using
> <label> markup is good but less crucial. And title attributes just tend to
> confuse people, especially if authors mistakenly use them _instead of_
> proper labeling.
>
> --
> Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ <http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/>;
>
>