WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: accessible form feedback

for

From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: Mar 6, 2003 5:48AM

With all due respect,

>
> As far as not being able to select multiple items, this works just fine.
> People using a mouse can use a combination of the mouse and the
> CTRL key (in
> Windows). People using the keyboard alone can do the following: {missing
content}
>

NO!!! Not all users know how to make multiple selections from a drop down
box, and not all OSes/User Agents support this functionality anyway. This
is NOT a good thing, and should be avoided at all costs, especially when
"mission critical".

This example does not indicate to me that this is the desired result anyway
(despite it's coding), but I would seek to "DISABLE" this functionality by
eliminating the "multiple" attribute: <select name="Employee_Status"
multiple>.

A few other observations...

Missing Doc Type Declaration means that this page cannot validate, which
contravenes W3C Priority 2 - 3.2 "Create documents that validate to
published formal grammars." This is perhaps my biggest RANT bugaboo. As
developers, the single most important thing we can do is ensure that the
code we are producing is compliant to a Standard, as this then shifts the
responsibility to the user agent to render standards compliant code
properly. I do not for a minute negate the fact that there are no truly
100% compliant browsers out there, and that we must still do a few
cartwheels to ensure approximate display parity across multiple user
agents/OSes. But at least by ensuring that the code we do produce conforms
to a standard we have reached a minimum basic requirement on our end. We're
not building cars, we're producing gasoline... If you chose to (or are
obligated to) use a clunker of a vehicle, well, that's the way it is. But
at least the gasoline that I dispense is pure and won't cause any damage...

Also, your in-line Style declarations are specifying fixed font sizes
(".font {font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;
font-weight: normal}"), which contravenes W3C Priority 2 - 3.4 "Use relative
rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style
sheet property values."

Finally, from an aesthetic perspective; I personally like to add a little
bit of padding to the fieldset declaration to give it some "breathing room"
(<fieldset style="padding: 8px;">). I'm also a big fan of using the Title
attribute in the <fieldset>, especially in longer forms (<fieldset
title="User Information" style="padding: 8px;">)

HTH

JF





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