Re: 508 Form fields question

> this compliant?  I understand that when a blind person enters text in
> the textarea they will not know that the textbox is changing.  Any

My concern is that they might know.  This is logically, although not
physically, a pop-up, as it is an unsolicited change to the page content.
If the assistive technology refocuses to track the change, the user could
get seriously confused.

Also, remember that this feature would need client side scripting, so the
user may disable it or use tools that do not support it.  That means that
if it is critical that the user see this information, the page design is
not viable.  I hope your database uses 32 bit characters, or you client
side reject unsupported characters; otherwise your remaining characters
count will go wrong when an unexpected character code is entered.

(It does look as though there may need to be an extension to textarea,
probably in its xforms replacement (if not already there) to specify a
maximum number of characters/bytes (if the database stores UTF-8 and
the user enters non-ascii characters, they may eat up the limit faster
than the rate at which characters are entered - this is also the case if
you force the browser into the typical error recovery strategy of sending
the numeric entity code).)

Received on Tuesday, 30 December 2003 13:03:22 UTC