Re: The <label>

Craig Francis wrote:
> Anyway, I have recently been working on a website where the fields 
> (radio) were presented in a tabular layout... its one of those "rate out 
> of 5" types where the thing to be rated is set per row, and the columns 
> are the radio fields 1 to 5.
> 
> Technically its possible to have used a drop down menu (select), however 
> we had a design to match.
> 
> While developing it, I was hoping to have the headers effectively be the 
> labels, instead of having to write out an off-screened label for each 
> field.

There was some discussion of the issue of associating labels with 
multiple controls on the WHATWG list in October and November 2006.  It 
started with this message:

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-October/007530.html

And continued in the threads "How not to fix HTML" and "Form Control 
Group Labels".

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-October/thread.html
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-November/thread.html

This is an example likert scale made by Derek Featherstone that has been 
marked up accessibly without using a table, but presented as a table 
using CSS.

http://boxofchocolates.ca/we05/examples/lickertscale-round2.html

The following article discusses the issue a bit more, and have used the 
title attribute on the input elements as a substitute for label.

http://enterpriseaccessibility.com/articles/AccessibleRadioButtons.html

Authors should not have to work around screen reader limitations like 
that.  Ideally, authors would be able to use a table and the screen 
readers should be able to recognise and make use of the table headers as 
the labels for the radio buttons.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Sunday, 5 August 2007 01:28:54 UTC