WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Form submission via enter key?

for

From: Nathalie Sequeira
Date: Nov 6, 2013 9:54AM

Well Paul, I could agree on this for a form that has required fields
that will be checked for completeness, or for a simple search box.

However, in my specific case we are talking of a more complex search
form that
a) has no required fields at all, so there will be no validation in the
way you mean (in fact, if you just send the empty form you will get a
complete list of all entries listed up by category hierarchy).
and
b) has text and checkbox inputs -which when focussed will submit the
form by default- AND selects -which won't do this by default.

So either way I had an inconsistency of the form's behaviour going on
there:
depending on where you were in the form, it would submit itself when
hitting enter -- or not.
And it irritated my client, leading them to suggest something I wasn't
comfortable at all with (i.e. submit via enter anytime).

The longer I think on it, the more I lean towards the view that indeed
default behaviour doesn't necessarily always equal expected behaviour,
let alone desirable behaviour.
There's a submit button, so why not use it, after having selected all
desired search criteria in an orderly manner?

Please show me where I am wrong if that is the case!
It is precisely for that reason that I posed this question to the list :)

Cheers,
Nathalie

Am 06.11.2013 15:52, schrieb Paul J. Adam:
> If that'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
>>
>>