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Re: Best practices for identifying forms and their fields

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: May 6, 2013 12:26PM

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 12:07 PM, Denis Boudreau wrote:

> I think it would be advisable to point out that for improved consistency and support with assistive technologies and user agents, relying on the aria-label attribute rather than the title attribute would be a good idea.

Are there modern user agents that do not read the title attribute if a
label is missing? I'm not aware of any. But I can think of lots of
user agents that don't support aria-label, including almost everything
over a year or so old.

I agree with you in principle - I've never been entirely comfortable
with using title as a replacement for a label. At a minimum it's an
abuse of the spirit of HTML's definition of title as being for
"advisory information". If it's inaccessible without the title, it
sounds like more than advisory to me. I do note, however, that title
has been redefined in HTML5 to include labels for interactive
controls.

If one can get the same behavior and support from a native HTML
attribute, I'd think it should be used over an ARIA attribute.

Jared