About H71- use of FIELDSET: addendum to email of July 11

Hello WCAG-WG,

Note I caution against retaining the following paragraph in H71:
“It can also be useful to group other sets of controls that are not as tightly related as sets of radio buttons and checkboxes. For instance, several fields that collect a user's address might be grouped together with a legend of "Address”.”

Comment: This may be alright if “Address” is a common label and  there are fields for line-1, line-2. Often the line-2 field may not have visible text label.  But if city / state / zip etc. have clear labels then they do not need to be grouped with fieldset/legend. Else AT will unnecessarily render ‘Address’ as a prefix for every field.
On the other hand if all the above fields were repeated with  identical labels  once for “Residential address” and once for “Business address” then a fieldset/legend may be appropriate  if an h<n> tag is not used for the group labels.  
Please refer to my email about H71 technique sent on July 11, 2010 in this context. It illustrates  a situation where it may be appropriate to use fieldset/legend: Where form controls have identical labels but belong to distinct groups. This should be used to replace the above paragraph. 
Sailesh Panchang (MS, ASQ-CSQE)
Tel 571-344-1765
Accessibility Services Lead at www.deque.com

Received on Friday, 30 July 2010 16:07:49 UTC