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Re: Login page accessibility

for

From: Tom Gilder
Date: Aug 14, 2002 9:38AM

On Wednesday, August 14, 2002, 3:48:47 PM, you wrote:
> The following page meets 508 and Bobby AAA requirements.
> http://www.hiking.onlinecommunity.com/login.asp

Erg, looks like a typical Bobby-fied page. I'm still wondering if Bobby does
more harm than good. You have two <noscript> elements, both with the same
meaningless message about JavaScript being disabled or not supported.

To be quite frank, why would anyone care? What do those noscript elements add
to the page? It seems to be the page functions perfectly fine without JS, and
you only get minor form checking functionality with it, which is not essential.

> However, I have a question about one of the Level AAA
> requirements concerning default text in form controls. How do you
> handle thing for login pages where passwords show up as *****?

The WCAG requirement (10.4) clearly states "Until user agents handle empty
controls correctly". In my opinion user agents now handle empty controls fine.

As far as I know, it was only extremely old browsers (Netscape v1 or 2, I
believe) that had problems with inputs with no default text set (you couldn't
tab to them using the keyboard, iirc).

I don't believe anyone (or at most a handful of people) with a choice of what
browser they use still use NS1 or 2. Most modern pages tend to either crash,
freeze or render unreadable on these browsers. They also don't support all the
modern HTTP functions that are commonly used these days.

> Also, what happens if the user has javascript disabled? I am using
> Javascript to remove the default text when the control has focus.

Very simply, The default text will remain unless the user deletes it. This can
sometimes be confusing or annoying to users, and cause more problems that it
solves.

On the other hand, however, default text can also be handy to prompt visual
users what to write. Sometimes users will scan a page for a search box -
ignoring any lables there might be, no matter how obvious you think they are -
come across an input box that is in fact for, say, a mailing list, and type
their search query there.

They of course instantly get "invalid e-mail address". If you use a default
value of " <EMAIL REMOVED> ", users are more unlikely to try and use it as a search
box. For the search box itself you could also use something like "enter
keywords".

So it's really up to you. Adding default text can make pages more accessible,
but can also annoy some other users.

Cheers
--
Tom Gilder
http://tom.me.uk/


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