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Re: Accessible Form Validation Errors

for

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Sep 17, 2004 8:36AM

I'd like to thank everyone for their advice/feedback on the accessible form
errors issue. Lots of good ideas. Here's what we came up with:

http://www.courts.state.mn.us/contact/?pageID=151

(If you want to play with this, please select the 'Webmaster' email contact
so you're not sending messages to random folks here ;o)

What I did was the following:

- left the entire form displayed if there are errors
- added the error message to the individual form element
LABELS.
- added an error summary at the top of the form that lists
each error and links to the field in question
- explicitely labeled each field as 'required' or 'optional'
with text in the LABEL
- note that the page does have SKIP TO CONTENT links at the
very top (hidden with CSS unless you explicitely decide
to see them using the ACCESSIBILITY page option)

Things that I thought were great ideas but haven't implemented yet:

- listing the number of errors in the TITLE (GREAT idea!)
- putting the error message at the very top of the page
(if I did that, I'm thinking I'd duplicate the error
summary and place it off screen via css ...so screen
readers would see it)

If anyone wants to take a look at point out any other improvements, feel
free to do so.

Also, please note that the site, overall, may still need some accessibility
tweaking (namely in older browsers). We just launched and now I'm going in
and polishing evertying up so I'm sure you'll be hearing from me some more
in the near future.

Again, thanks for the great discussion on this topic.

-Darrel