- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Tue, 08 May 2007 23:38:48 +0100
Kristof Zelechovski wrote: >>From the behavioral point of view: The purpose of a LABEL control is to > redirect focus on click. It does not make much sense with a TEXTAREA > control that is usually big enough to click upon. That is not /the/ purpose of a LABEL element, but merely one way in which user agents can use LABEL. Another use is for a screen reader to label particular fields accurately, especially important when hopping between fields. >>From a semantic point of view: the TEXTAREA control is special because it > does not make sense to ask whether the content of the TEXTAREA is or even > contains some fixed text because the user may express the same meaning with > different words; its content may be stored but you have to use advanced text > analysis tools (such as a human reader) to process it if you need to. You > can use a label to define what you expect the user to enter into the > control; the TEXTAREA control is so special that it seems obvious that it > needs a caption or some introductory explanation, not a label (except for > the labels "Your message" and "Your text", which are possible but not very > informative indeed.) Some uses of TEXTAREA are straightforward, some are complex. All benefit from the addition of a LABEL. It would probably help if we could associate short labels and longer descriptions with form fields. It would certainly help if we could do so with fieldsets: http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/general-accessibility/too-much-accessibility-fieldset-legends/ -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2007 15:38:48 UTC