RE: 508 Form fields question

Hello, Derek,

Derek wrote:
>4. This one is a bit more sketchy, and mostly thinking out loud. From a
>cognitive perspective, might it be more useful to have a character
count of
>how many characters have been typed, with an appropriate message,
rather
>than simply how many characters are remaining? The reason I think this
is
>that if you include a statement at the start of the form as to how many
>characters are allowed in the textarea (i.e., Your text submission
should be
>limited to 500 characters), it might make more sense to follow up with
"Your
>text submission is currently 424 characters out of the 500 character
limit"
>or some other appropriate text. Perhaps? Like I said, this last one is
more
>sketchy and I'm just thinking out loud...

This is very an interesting point, Derek. It makses sense to count what
you have typed as most applications (such as MS Word) will tell you how
many words you have typed, although they don't limit the number of words
you can type! If you do have to limit the number of words, it sure will
be more usuful to show how many characters have been typed (i.e.,
125/200). It will be much easier to understand that way than being told
how many more characters you can type. Say, how many people will have an
immediate idea of how many words they can type if they are told they
have 75 characters remaining? 

Kind regards,
Keiko

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Keiko OKADA 
k-okada@mitsue.co.jp
http://www.mitsue.co.jp
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Received on Sunday, 4 January 2004 21:14:30 UTC