Re: form failure

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Donna m87 wrote:

> Comments on my efforts to date are appreciated, you can see where I
> am going wrong here: <http://members.rogers.com/dm87>

It seems to contain quotations from some checkers' reports.
As the first step, I would suggest _not_ using any checkers before you
have a good understanding of accessibility, and then using checkers only
with discretion. Aim at accessibility, not passing "accessibility tests".
Use the checkers as tools only, and don't do anything that they say unless
you understand what they say and why it would be good for accessibility.

Your form is very sketchy, but the basic approach is OK. You have one
label and one field in one paragraph, fine. You could alternatively use
div and not p markup, since you haven't really got paragraphs there, but
that's less essential. The essential thing is to have clear structure
where it is sufficiently clear what each field is.

The second part,

  <label for="first name"> First Name:
  <input name="firstname" type="text" id="firstname" value="First Name"
size="25" maxlength="45" tabindex="2">
  </label>

is fine except for a small typo: "first name" should be "firstname".
Computers are picky about spelling.

For the first part,

<p> Category
    <select name="category" label="category" tabindex="1">
    <option selected label="first category" value="FirstCategory">First
Category
    <option label="second category" value="SecondCategory">Second Category
    </select>
</p>

the problem is just that the you have label attributes that aren't needed
(they're to be used for _hierarchic_ menus, as the HTML specifications
explain - and this stuff isn't really supported by browsers) and you lack
a label _element_. You should use a label element in a manner similar to
the first part, namely

<p><label for="category">Category</label>
    <select id="category" name="category">
    <option selected value="FirstCategory">First Category
    <option value="SecondCategory">Second Category
    </select>
</p>

I dropped the tabindex attribute, since it's redundant when the ordering
of the fields is right, corresponding to the natural filling order.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 26 March 2003 12:12:52 UTC