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Re: ARIA and Label tags both for Error Messages

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From: Hewitt,Susan (DSHS)
Date: Feb 11, 2014 3:34PM

Do you mean you would include the error information within the label tag? (Obviously you wouldn't to drop them completely.)

I agree with Yucca that this doesn't seem very semantic although I think the case could be made that it's not forbidden. W3C spec says: "The LABEL element may be used to attach information to controls." I think that gives license to include error information within <label> (after all, it's commonly used to provide formatting info and required status after all.) I also don't think it's inappropriate to use aria-describedby in this situation. But I would not use both methods.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Susan Grossman
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2014 3:48 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] ARIA and Label tags both for Error Messages

We have been associating error messages to form fields using aria-describedby, and the screen reader users who tested it thought it worked well for them.

We have gotten some push back from a federal agency saying that no ARIA is supported well enough to rely on and that we must you both aria and label tags to associate the error messages.

My questions:

1) Do others agree that even aria-describedby (no Live Regions, etc.) isn't supported enough to stand on it's own

2) Would the redundancy caused by both label tags and aria become too much to hear for those who can utilize ARIA?

3) If yes to 1 and 2, does that leave us with just implementing the association with label tags, or is there something else we should be considering?

Understand that we can still keep things like aria-required (or similar)
because they're a progressive enhancement - asterisk or (optional) is
still there in the form element label.

Any help is appreciated - couldn't quite find this discussion in archives


--
*Susan R. Grossman*
<EMAIL REMOVED>