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Re: Are fieldset and legend still relevant?

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From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Dec 30, 2014 10:15AM

Data table accessibility is also broken in iOS 8 and VoiceOver, it worked in 7. Fieldset/Legend has never worked on iOS but used to work on OS X, now it's broken in OS X. Data table accessibility does work in OS X thankfully!

Firefox on Android with TalkBack has the best mobile accessibility support! It handles Fieldset/Legend perfectly by reading the Legend once when setting focus to an input in the Fieldset whether from the top or bottom of the Fieldset.

It sucks when you recommend using Fieldset/Legend and then VoiceOver never works with it! I also don't want to recommend slapping aria-labelledby on every single input when you could just use HTML4 semantics.


Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
www.deque.com <http://www.deque.com/>;
> On Dec 30, 2014, at 10:44 AM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> 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
> > >