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Re: form input field with Browse button type=file

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jan 9, 2003 7:46AM

On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Terence de Giere wrote:

> - - I discovered that the
> file upload browse button would not work with the keyboard in two of the
> three browsers I was using.

Thanks for bringing this serious problem to our attention. I'm
embarrassed at not having noticed it before, despite being regarded (by
myself and some others) as an expert in accessibility and in file input
issues. I mention this as an indication of how limited our knowledge (or
mine at least) is, despite our efforts to work with and for accessibility.

I have updated my page on file input, adding a short section on
accessibility,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/file.html#acc
and I even took the liberty of using your wordings more or less directly.

My practical conclusion is that authors should include some explicit note
about a file input field coming. It may not help much when a user
encounters such a field for the first time in his life, but upon
subsequent occasions, it tells him to stay tuned to something special, and
perhaps at this point, before entering the file input field, to access the
file system outside the browser and find the exact path name of the file
he wants to submit.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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