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RE: Login page accessibility

for

From: Steve Vosloo
Date: Aug 14, 2002 11:32PM

Also, it can confuse a user on assistive technologies to have the focus
immediately placed in the text box. I've never tested this myself but
have read that because screen readers work linearly through a page it is
confusing for the user to suddenly start half-way through a page.

Steve



-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Gilder [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: 14 August 2002 06:30 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: Login page accessibility


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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