WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Form submission via enter key?

for

From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Nov 6, 2013 7:52AM


If thatÂ’s the standard behavior of web forms then why break the norm? And yes like you said when I do my form validation if they press enter key on the first input it would then send their focus to the first invalid input and read the error message automatically. So they could keep pressing ENTER all they want until every field is filled out correctly. Validation should handle any cases of the user accidentally pressing the enter key too soon.

On Nov 6, 2013, at 8:45 AM, Corbett, James < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi:
>
> Would you really want that to happen? If you had ten edit fields and you allowed the enter key to evoke a submission on the first field, there would be obvious issues. I realize that client side and or server side validation would or could intercept such behaviour but it would be a poor design from the word go....
>
> Jim
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Paul J. Adam
> Sent: November 6, 2013 9:40 AM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Form submission via enter key?
>
> The default behavior is to use the ENTER key when focused inside any of the form inputs, this fires the onSubmit event. No reason to change that. What you should not be doing, and a bug I've seen before, is allowing an ENTER key event to submit the form when they are NOT focused inside an input.
>
> So ENTER should only work to Submit the form when focused inside one of the form's inputs.
>
> Paul J. Adam
> Accessibility Evangelist
> www.deque.com
>
> On Nov 6, 2013, at 12:12 AM, Nathalie Sequeira < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Thank you all very much for your feedback!
>>
>> I am quite reassured now that submission via enter key needs to be
>> disabled altogether in this case, even where default HTML behaviour
>> would allow it.
>> Then, the form can only be submitted via the submit button (the exact
>> opposite of what the client wants - haha, it's going to be fun selling
>> that to them ;D ).
>>
>> I am also thinking of collapsing the fieldset with instrument checkboxes
>> by default (which will also help declutter the form), so one needn't tab
>> through all those options to get to the submit button.
>>
>> Thanks also Detlev for the heads up regarding button states, I will look
>> into that too.
>>
>> Cheers!
>> Nathalie
>>
>> >> >> >
> > > > > >