WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Titles for non-visual UAs?

for

From: Randy Pearson
Date: Apr 16, 2005 7:38AM

>> Putting such text on the form as document content
>> reduces usability for all by adding clutter, so I guess I'll just get
>> rid of it entirely!


That strikes me as an over-reaction. If the text is worthy of being
displayed by a less-than-accessible "tooltip" style of presentation, it
would seem valuable enough to show on the form.

I would be inclined to handle this in a uniform manner, augmented with a CSS
class to allow global changes to your decision. Suppose you dub these text
snippets as "label clarifiers". You could then render a control something
like:

<div class="control">
<label for="txtBirthday">Birthday: </label>
<span class="labelClarifier">Please enter dates using MM-DD-YYYY
format.</span>
<input type="text" id="txtBirthday" value="" size="12" />
</div>

Now you could reduce that feeling of visual clutter by providing a softer
look to the additional text, while still keeping it available and
accessible. For example:

.labelClarifier{
font-size: 90%;
font-style: italic;
color: #666; /* somewhat gray */
}

This would make it easy to handle new decisions quickly, such as adding
"display: none;" to remove the text (perhaps as a user preference), etc.

-- Randy

___________