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Re: Accessible checkboxes & radio buttons in fieldsets with right-aligned labels

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From: Nathalie Sequeira
Date: Oct 22, 2010 12:00AM

Hello Allison,

> In general, this idea seems like a bit of a hack
>
Yes, I usually find gut feelings like that are pretty good indications
of that something is going wrong - and having to add superfluous stuff
(that in turn needs to be hidden again, causing a bunch of headaches)
rings alarm bells indeed :)

I took a quick look at the form in question, and - if I were working on
this - I'd take a quick step back and re-analyse the form's semantic
structuring. Interestingly, the heads up for this was in other parts of
the form, e.g. the "other role" input (shouldn't that be a
sub-information of the checkbox "other" above, which is inside a
fieldset "Role"?) or the "date started" vs. "Date ended" ... so there
might be a solution hidden along that path.

Unfortunately, I do not have the mentioned FF3.5 at the tip of my
fingers, so I do not know what woes become visible there.
But a quick check in IE6 & IE7 does not reveal any truly unsettling
jumbling of the layout that couldn't be fixed via conditional comments
(btw the legend floats nicely to the left in both cases, if that was the
problem?).
Of course, how far you want to dig in this direction depends a lot on
the expected audience and their technical profiles.

But personally I like the approach of doing the basics cleanly (i.e. on
the HTML structuring level), assuring optimal experience in newest user
agents via CSS, and letting the layout degrade gracefully & usably (and
if the semantics are right, that WILL be the case) for those very old
UAs that shouldn't really be around anymore anyway.

HTH in finding a viable approach!
Nathalie