WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: form select dropdown - label, title or aria?

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Sep 9, 2015 1:14PM

[DianeT wrote] Given that, I think I'll go with the aria-label :)

I have two comments that are food for thought and not a criticism. I hope they don't complicate the situation but it's important to consider the non-screen reader implications of the situation.

Currently Dragon Naturally Speaking does not support the aria-label property. So people who use Dragon may not be able to speak the name of the field to focus it. This is a common issue and Dragon users often rely on spoken keyboard interface commands or may be able to use other direct voice commands such as "click list" to focus a select box. Title is better supported by Dragon as far as I know.

When the select field contains a value other than the default explainer value there may be no visual label for the field. WCAG SC 3.3.2 requires visual labels for all user input. It is worth considering this as a potential reason to have a label that is always visually available.

Best Regards,

Jonathan

--
Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
<EMAIL REMOVED>

703-637-8957 (o)
Follow us: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Newsletter


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2015 2:36 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] form select dropdown - label, title or aria?

On 8 September 2015 at 3:52pm, Steve Faulkner < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:
>In the abssence of any other source of an accessible name for a control
>title works well across browsers and AT.
>aria-label is the more semantically correct method and also works well,
>but older browsers (IE< 9 or 10) don't support.

Thanks for the feedback and the link.

For the sites we're currently building, we don't support anything below IE9 anyway (and that will change to 10 soon), and visitors will get an 'outdated browser' message if they land on our sites using an unsupported browser version, so they are notified immediately.

Given that, I think I'll go with the aria-label :)

Regards,
DianeT
(hope I did this right, it's been a really long time since I used a list like this)