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Re: Are fieldset and legend still relevant?

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Dec 30, 2014 9:44AM


Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:

> Honestly what we need to do more of, as a group, is to actively
> request fixes in our assistive technologies, rather than forcing
> ourselves and others to keep coding around individual bugs or
> questionable interpretations.

This! It is inexplicable that VoiceOver and (at last check)
Window-Eyes do not yet support reading legend when navigating to
controls within a fieldset. It also doesn't make sense that JAWS would
ever ignore this critical association, even when the verbosity
settings are cranked up.

I certainly would not consider using fieldset/legend alone a WCAG
failure. It is, however, clearly an ATAG failure if a screen reader
doesn't support them.

As far as ARIA approaches to address these deficiencies, for radio
buttons, a proper approach would be to use role="radiogroup" on the
grouping, and aria-labelledby to reference the 'legend'. But alas,
this also is not yet supported in VoiceOver.

Jared