RE: A new one: label vs. Scope

The good example for assigning multiple labels to a single form control is
in an online testing situation
you have a multiple choice question with 4 answers. Using 'label', you can
only put the label for the answer. the question text is not associated with
the form controls.
when using a screenreader, it is easy to jump from control to control, but
jumping to 'a. 254 radio button not pressed' does not give you any
information about the question. So the user must navigate to the question
text read it then move onward to the answers. Hopefully, the user remembers
the question when reaching the last answer choice. Additionally, the user
must discern the Q&A layout: question on top, answer on bottom;
question -left, answer-right; etc.

being able to associate different 'labels' from the question and the answer
to the control would help this situation. I am sure there are other
non-academic examples.

Jim Allan, Webmaster & Statewide Technical Support Specialist
Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired
1100 W. 45th St., Austin, Texas 78756
voice 512.206.9315    fax: 512.206.9264  http://www.tsbvi.edu/
"I see the Earth. It is so beautiful."--first words spoken by human in
space.
[Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, from the Vostok 1, April 12, 1961.]


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Andy J. W. Affleck
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 10:10 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: A new one: label vs. Scope


Charles McCathieNevile at charles@w3.org wrote:

> It is unfortunate that HTML doesn't offer a way of assigning multiple
> form fields to a single label (and vice versa).
>
> It does. Fieldset/legend assign one label to multiple controls:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#edef-FIELDSET

These are two different things. Fieldset/legend are for logical groupings of
form elements at a more macro level. If I have a section denoted by a
fieldset with a legend of "Personal Information" I may have 10 form elements
within it (First name, last name, street, city, state, zip, etc.) Within all
of that I may have a phone number label with three elements after it for the
three parts of the phone number. Fieldset/legend would not make sense here.
Rather, a different construct which lets me use one label for all three
elements (or rather, three labels which explain the three parts for people
who need it leaving it at one label and three fields for people who don't).

Fieldset, to my way of thinking, is a larger level construct which won't
solve the problems we've been discussing here the last few days.

As for assigning multiple labels to a single element, I don't see why anyone
would want to do that. Can anyone think of a situation? It seems to me that
you'd just make the single label more descriptive to cover it adequately.

-A


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Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 15:22:45 UTC