ACTION-1422: Develop proposal for label role and aria-labelfor property

Per discussion in the ARIA meeting on April 21, there was consensus to 
drop the proposal for an aria-labelfor attribute to go with the new role 
label. The group did not identify any specific benefits of an 
aria-labelfor that are not provided by aria-labelledby.

Proposed specification text for role label follows.

Label

An element containing content that labels another element. A label MUST 
have an explicit relationship with the element it labels expressed with 
aria-labelledby on the element being labeled.

The most common accessibility API mapping for a label is the accessible 
name property. However, because aria-labelledby is required to create the 
labelling relationship, use of role label on an element does not change 
the accessible name computation of the element to which the label applies.

Authors are not required to use role label to identify elements that serve 
as a label but may do so in order to provide semantic clarity in code.

Related concepts:
* HTML label
* HTML caption
* HTML figcaption

Matt King
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member
I/T Chief Accessibility Strategist
IBM BT/CIO - Global Workforce and Web Process Enablement 
Phone: (503) 578-2329, Tie line: 731-7398
mattking@us.ibm.com