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Re: Relating answer options to their question

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Aug 31, 2018 9:13AM

This is an area of WCAG that is subjective. I'm sure many would flag a lack
of a fieldset/legend for a group of radio buttons as being a failure under
1.3.1. The WCAG documentation does list adding a fieldset/legend as a
Sufficient Technique (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H71.html). This,
of course, does not mean that you have to have one in order to be
conformant. The documentation does not list lack of fieldset/legend as a
failure.

Support for fieldset/legend varies across browsers and screen readers.
Various screen readers treat them very differently - some repeat the legend
for every control within the fieldset. This can be very intrusive and
annoying, especially if the legend is lengthy. Chrome *STILL* doesn't
support them at all. As you note, styling has historically been a bit
difficult, but I think this is much less of an issue in modern browsers.
You can remove all of the legend styling to keep the semantics without any
of the styling problems.

As an alternative, you could use role="radiogroup" with an ARIA label to
group radio buttons and provide the grouping a label. For screen reader
users, this should be treated identically to fieldset/legend. Radiogroup
is, however, only for radio button groups - it shouldn't be used for groups
of checkboxes or other controls (though last time I tested it seemed to
work OK).

In my opinion, I think fieldset/legend (or radiogroup) is certainly optimal
for groupings of controls that are ambiguous without the association of the
higher level description/legend (or group label), but I think it may be a
bit of a stretch to call it a 1.3.1 failure if that descriptive text is
present immediately before the grouping.

I ran into an interesting, related question just yesterday - is it a WCAG
1.3.1 failure for a text box to have a fieldset legend, but not a label?

Jared


On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 3:24 AM, Isabel Holdsworth <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> On one of our pages there's a heading, a question and a set of
> checkboxes that allow the user to choose one or more answers from a
> list of four or five possibles.
>
> We've been advised that not wrapping the whole thing in a fieldset
> with the question as a legend could be a WCAG2 fail (I'm not sure
> under which guideline).
>
> As a screenreader user, I find that this sort of mark-up can be
> intrusive, as I have to listen to the whole question before hearing
> the label on the first checkbox. Also, long legends are notoriously
> difficult to style upp using CSS.
>
> Is there any other, less intrusive, way of associating a question with
> its possible answers, or is the fact that the question appears just
> before the options in the DOM enough to create an implicit
> association?
>
> Thanks as always for any thoughts on this.
>
> Cheers, Isabel
> > > > >