RE: Disabled form fields

Whilst I would not necessarily disagree, it is worth noting that Dragon voice recognition software can actually write to read-only textboxes. Depending on the context, this may or may not be a problem.

It certainly was a problem on a timesheet website we were testing recently. The hours in the timesheet should not be editable by a manager, but they did need to fill in other fields and submit the form. If they were using Dragon, they could modify the hours too. A server-side solution was used to ignore the changes to the hours, although other approaches may work.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com>
Sent: 14 December 2018 23:00
To: 'Harry Loots' <harry.loots@ieee.org>; 'W3C WAI ig' <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: RE: Disabled form fields

The subject of this thread is ‘disabled form fields’.

Is this a question about colour contrast or the appropriate use of the disabled attribute?

In my view, the disabled attribute should never be used on a text field – only the readonly attribute.

And, conversely, the readonly attribute shouldn’t be used on radio or push buttons or select elements etc.

This at least makes the problematic user agent styling go away for inactive text fields …

With regards to disabled elements with activation behaviours, however, there is tension in my mind between:

  *   Colour being the only visual conveyor of information (i.e. success criterion 1.4.1) and this exception
  *   There being a blanket exception for disabled controls

These seem to me to be glitches, though I can understand that changing this requirement could be problematic both then and now.



From: Harry Loots [mailto:harry.loots@ieee.org]
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 9:20 PM
To: W3C WAI ig
Subject: Disabled form fields

Dear all

My understanding of SC 1.4.3 (Contrast) is that disabled form fields should also be subject to minimum contrast levels, since these fields may provide pertinent information to the user.

Example from Google Material Design assets:
[image.png]

What is the view of this group?

Kindest regards
Harry