WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

HTML5 validation messages

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Oct 19, 2017 9:02AM

Greetings all

HTML5 form validation is cool, easy, and quite accessible.
I am really excited about the accessibility improvement possibilities!

But there is one problem that concerns me, that is the lack of
persistent error messages.
In most browsers a custom validation error message is displayed only
for a couple of seconds, then it disappears.
I am worried this is not enough time for screen magnification users,
or users with cognitive impairments to process the information,
understand the problem and correct it.

I don't think WCAG really says anything about visual persistence of
error messages, so These may be technically compliant, but they remain
a problem for users, which is the primary concern.

Is there a way, using CSS pseudo classes, to make these error messages
persistent?
If not, is there work going on at the browser-level to fix this (I
will start Googling around when I have time, I am just curious if
somebody else has already looked into it).

There are very simple error messages that may not need to be
persistent, e.g. a required field was left blank, pretty obvious.
But there are more complex HTML5 validations, e.g. when the user input
does not fit the required pattern (as specified by the pattern
attribute).
The error message needs to enforce the pattern and explain why the
user input failed.


Thanks
-Birkir


--
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.