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Re: WCAG SC1.3.5 (Identify Input Purpose) and UK addresses

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 3, 2023 3:18AM


According to the authors of this success criterion, the objective has nothing to do with auto-filling forms. It's to allow user agents to reliably understand the purpose of each field so they can use that to help people with cognitive impairments, such as by displaying icons next to them. I don't believe any user agents do that at the moment, but that's not relevant to WCAG conformance.

Reverse engineering Google and other autofill features isn't going to work because my understanding is that they identify fields by the visible text label and they only recognise "autocomplete" values of "on" and "off". They don't use the values specified in WCAG.

Steve