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Re: combo box coding

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From: Bourne, Sarah (ITD)
Date: Nov 14, 2014 2:00PM

WebAIM (as always!) has great information on how a combo box should be coded. They call it a "select menu" and their guidance is here:
http://webaim.org/techniques/forms/controls#select

The text inside the LABEL tags is what identifies what the combo box is, and it should be different than any other combo boxes on the page. If there is no visible text, because the designer assumes (sighted) people will be able to figure it out in some other way, the developer can use CSS to hide that text from visual users. Here are some techniques for doing that:
http://webaim.org/techniques/css/invisiblecontent/

If you have the WebAIM WAVE toolbar (http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar) or Chrome extension (http://wave.webaim.org/extension) installed, it will tell you if the label is missing - just in case it's been hidden already. (Although I doubt it - it should show up in your list, depending on what tool you are using to create that list.)

sb
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of IT Accessibility
Massachusetts Office of Information Technology
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1 Ashburton Pl. rm 1601 Boston MA 02108
617-626-4502
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.mass.gov/itd