Re: Accessibility of forms?

I have not looked in the ANSI guidelines for this, but the
access issues for forms are older than the Web.  There may
be some good ideas in the general CHI literature.

The PA guidelines draft does briefly mention making sure that
text entry fields are non-empty initially.

Another point we were discussing on the GL list recently (but
which is not in the draft at the moment) is having description
and action (label and control or entry field) on one line.  This
is a bit on the conservative side but it is still a good idea
today.  The next stop on the "back off and gain perspective"
track after "read the current line" is to start over from the
upper-left.  You don't want to have to do that too often.

The examples at

 Speech-Friendly Search Engine Query Submission Forms
 http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/search.html

are instructive.  See also Cathy's Newsstand.

And _tell us_ when you find something better.

Al

Received on Monday, 24 August 1998 16:15:38 UTC