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Unlabelled radio buttons

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From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 5, 2018 9:08AM

Radio buttons are definitely the right way to do this, with one to leave a question unanswered as you described. Use hidden labels for any radio buttons that don't have visible ones.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Isabel Holdsworth
Sent: 05 September 2018 16:03
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Unlabelled radiobuttons

Hi all,

I've been tasked with creating a UI for presenting Likert scale questions, where the answers range from one extreme to another. For example "Strongly disagree" up to "Strongly agree", or "Very dissatisfied" up to "Very satisfied".

The UI can present a single question or a series of questions whose answers are all on the same scale.

For the multiple questions, I presented them in a table with the questions on the left and their associated radiobuttons distributed across the row. The radiobuttons took their labels from the row headings. It was a really accessible solution.

But now I'm told that not every option will always have an explicit label. They gave me an example where 1 = very sad, 4 = neutral, 7 = very happy, and the other options are unlabelled.

So I thought a slider might work. I got a nice set of sliders working with the question as the label, the labelled options being picked up by the aria-valuetext attribute, and unlabelled steps in the slider having their default numeric values.

But that's not quite what's needed either, since there needs to be the option to clear an answer and leave the question unanswered, which AFAIK can't be done using a slider.

If I fall back to the radiobutton option, I could add a "Clear answer"
button that deselects a selected radiobutton. They want checkboxes, as these can be natively deselected, but I hope I've convinced them that this is the wrong mechanism for single-option answers.

Do you think that radiobuttons are the correct mechanism for presenting this sort of scenario?

All thoughts and comments welcome as always.

Thanks, Isabel