WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Explicit Link Between Radio Buttons and "Question" Label?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 12, 2003 3:37PM

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim Harshbarger wrote:

> On each page of the survey, there are about 12 to 20 questions. On a page,
> all the questions share the same possible multiple choice answers. For
> instance, "Strongly Agree," "Agree", "Disagree," or "Strongly Disagree."

The first problem here is the lack of a neutral, no-answer alternative.
In fact, people will refuse to answer and they will think they did not
answer, but depending on the _browser_, their answer (as received by the
form handler) can be "Strongly Agree"! This is not particular an
accessibility issue but a general robustness question. However, people
with various problems in cognitive or mental functions may even get
particularly stressed when faced with an apparent inability to leave a
question unanswered, in the sense of explicitly selecting "no answer".

So I would recommend adding yet another alternative, e.g. "Cannot or don't
want to answer" and making it preselected. It could be the last one in a
group. For more detailed arguments in favor of such an approach, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/choices.html

> Those multiple choice labels are at the top of the column of each set of
> radio buttons.

I hope the page is programmatically generated, since I think that for
accessibility, and for usability too, the structure needs to be changed.

> How would you write the HTML/XHTML for that so it fit standards and is
> accessible?

I would remove the table structure and make each question with the choices
a <fieldset>, where each radio button - label text pair appears on a line
of its own. This implies that each alternative in each question can have a
label of its own.

It wastes paper, but there is no paper. That is, on the Web, there is no
need to follow the paradigms of paper form design, which is often hostile
to accessibility due to practical questions of saving paper (compact
layout, small font, etc.).

You will probably get better quality results too, when people don't see so
clearly what they have answered to previous questions. It's better that
they concentrate on each question at a time, instead of seeing too clearly
that they have e.g. given so many "Strongly disagree" answers that they
"need" to balance things.

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


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/