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Re: Radio Buttons Again!

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 20, 2003 7:01AM

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Tim Harshbarger wrote:

> Someone is designing an interface. They need the group label for radio
> buttons to appear to the left of the group of radio buttons. All the
> related radio buttons appear on the same line with their specific labels
> appearing directly to the right of the related radio button.

I'm not sure I understand the situation (a URL would help), but I suppose
this means that you have the entire group on one line. Well, that goes
against good accessibility, no matter what WAI guidelines say. The
guidelines formulate the relevant guideline rather confusingly, and the
"Errata" document changes (!) the recommendation, without really making
things clear. But in practical terms, the _safe_ approach is as follows:

Label for the group
( ) label for button
( ) label for button
...

where ( ) indicates a radio button. It's not just for speech browsers.
People who see a string of buttons and interspersing texts easily get
confused: which button is for which text? (Even "normal" people get
confused that way. So what about people with cognitive disabilities?)

If the design requires that the label for the group appeat to the left of
the group, the design is simply wrong, by accessibility criteria.
You can reduce some of the damage by using <label> markup etc., but just
some of it.

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


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