* for required Re: Inline Style Sheet Question

Hi Kim,

in principle you are not wrong, although this may be a case where you  
could sensibly use a span, since the semantics you are conveying are not  
necessarily emphasis.

However one thing that many screen reader users in particular do to make  
life more bearable is set their system not to listen to punctuation. So  
the asterisk itself will be ignored...

A couple of ways around it: emphasise the labels (although some screen  
readers don't actually pick up emphasis at all :-( for things that are  
required, or put a word like optional or required in. This last is  
becoming much more common, and strikes me as the best solution where there  
are just a couple of optional or just a couple of required fields.

You could also use the title attribute, but remember that this is not  
going to be sen by some users at all so don't rely on it as the only  
mechanism.

cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 11:04:20 +1000, Beheler Kim <beheler_kim@bah.com>  
wrote:

> I thought that using Color to convey information would be something
> like...
>
> All text in Red indicates a negative value.  $5.00
>
> In my case you have the text "* indicates a required field" at the top
> of the page and the * would be the reason it is not just color conveying
> the information.  Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf
>
> Of Beheler Kim
>
> Sent: Friday, 8 April 2005 8:40 AM
>
> To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>
> Subject: RE: Inline Style Sheet Question
>
>
>
> Thanks for everyone's feedback. I guess I should've given more of an
> explanation of why I wanted to use different colors. I have a sentence
> that says: "* indicates a required field", where the * will be red.
> Throughout the page (and web site) the * will be next to required form
> elements.  I will either use the <strong> or <em> tag to format the *.

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Friday, 8 April 2005 06:05:02 UTC