Re: Example of using required, invalid and alert

David Poehlman wrote:
"The problem with tab is that not enough information is given through
the use of it when interacting with forms to make an informed
decision as to what to do."

I agree with David's observations for the most part.  Most web site
designers seem adverse to creating semantically useful labels, and instead
they rely on the surrounding text to provide context in order to provide
disambiguation for their semantically weak labels.  There are some instances
where the labels do have enough semantic content to be useful, on a page
that just contains a form for example, but when a form field is embedded
into other content, such as a search field, the labels are usually
semantically weak.

Will
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Poehlman" <poehlman1@comcast.net>
To: "David Bolter" <david.bolter@utoronto.ca>
Cc: "Becky Gibson" <Becky_Gibson@notesdev.ibm.com>; <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 11:20 PM
Subject: Re: Example of using required, invalid and alert


>
> The problem with tab is that not enough information is given through  the 
> use of it when interacting with forms to make an informed  decision as to 
> what to do.
>
> On Feb 22, 2007, at 4:05 PM, David Bolter wrote:
>
>
> Becky all examples work for me.  I see three levels of annoyance. The  one 
> were you trapped me in the text field until a valid entry was  made was 
> definitely annoying. The others were fine but I think it  depends on 
> circumstance.  If I was using a screen reader and want to  explore things 
> via tab, the first example would also annoy me I  think.  Do you think 
> that is a common use case?  To explore a form  via tab?
>
> BTW if we go with a tooltip alert approach we discussed off-list  (sorry 
> all) we are going to have similar questions I think.
>
> cheers,
> David
>
> Becky Gibson wrote:
>> I have updated my examples a bit and gotten the questions  answered.
>>
>>> Do we expect that there can be more than one state - both required  and 
>>> invalid?  Should I remove the required field when I set the  invalid 
>>> role?
>>
>>
>> Since required and invalid are properties, both can be set on the  same 
>> element.
>> I also updated the example  to catch the onblur event when a field  is 
>> losing focus and forcing focus back to that field when it is  invalid. 
>> This can be quite annoying so I'm looking for feedback on  how folks feel 
>> about that.
>> I've added an example where I monitor the onkeydown event and catch  the 
>> tab key and enter key and check for errors.  When the tab key  is pressed 
>> and there is an error, I make the error message visible  and force focus 
>> back into the field.  If the user presses tab a  second time, I allow 
>> focus to move to the next control. The error  message is still displayed 
>> but at least the user is not "trapped"  in the field until the error is 
>> fixed. Does this seem like a  worthwhile convention to encourage?
>> I've added a bit more text for each of the three examples to  explain the 
>> behavior of each.
>>
>>
>>
>> This is an XHTML file with a content-type of application/xhtml+xml  so it 
>> can only be opened properly  in Firefox or Opera, although I  did not 
>> test in Opera.
>>
>> Becky Gibson
>> Web Accessibility Architect
>>                                                        IBM Emerging 
>> Internet Technologies
>> 5 Technology Park Drive
>> Westford, MA 01886
>> Voice: 978 399-6101; t/l 333-6101
>> Email: gibsonb@us.ibm.com
>>
>>
>
>
>
>

Received on Saturday, 24 February 2007 23:38:53 UTC