Fw: Labeling Groups of Radio Buttons

----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron Smith" <aaron@gwmicro.com>
To: "Mike Scott" <mscott@msfw.com>; "WAI Interest Group"
<w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: Labeling Groups of Radio Buttons


Mike,

You bring up an interesting concept, especially where IE is concerned.

Window-Eyes supports what you're trying to do, but IE does not. Here's
why.

When you put controls inside of a LABEL tag, IE promptly concatenates
all
of the field names into one name for each control. You can see this
clearly
with INSPECT or AccExplorer (both from the MSAA SDK -
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/msaa/download.htm). So with Window-Eyes
(out of MSAA), you would tab to the first radio button and hear, "What
kind
of cheese do you want on your pizza Mozzarella Cheddar None."

If IE would properly assign names to the right controls, then
Window-Eyes
would speak (when you tabbed), "What kind of cheese do you want on your
pizza checkbox checked Mozzarella." Another tab would yield, "What kind
of
cheese do you want on your pizza checkbox checked Cheddar," and so on.

So what you're trying to do is correct and a good design method. But IE
either doesn't understand that, or accept that. Looks like it's time to
contact our favorite Microsoft representatives. <grin>

At 11:44 AM 5/25/2001 -0500, Mike Scott wrote:
>Does anyone have ideas on the appropriate way to mark up a group of
>radio/option buttons (input type="radio") so that a screen
reader/talking
>browser can identify the group name as well as the label of the
individual
>buttons.
>
>For example, if the group was:
>         "What kind of cheese do you want on your pizza?",
>and the radio buttons are:
>         "Mozzarella",
>         "Cheddar",
>         "None".
>
>and the user tabbed to the radio buttons (a la IE & JAWS in "forms
mode"),
>only the radio button label is read. So in this case, the user hears
>"Mozzarella [tab]Cheddar [tab] None" but never hears what the question
is...
>
>Currently, I've got the radio button labels (Mozzarella, Cheddar, none)
>tagged with <Label> for their respective buttons. I've tried using
><Fieldset> with <Legend> marking up the group label (What kind of
cheese...)
>, but JAWS doesn't read it as I would have expected. Home Page Reader
>handles it a little better by simply reading the group lable before the
>first value -- if you're on the third button, you still have to arrow
back
>to the first if you want to re-read the group label, but it's
managable.
>
>So two questions:
>(1) What is the "correct" way to markup the button and group labels?,
and
>(2) What is the most practical way considering what the leading
assistive
>technologies support?
>
>Thanks,
>Mike

--
Aaron Smith
GW Micro
Phone: 219/489-3671
Fax: 219/489-2608
WWW: http://www.gwmicro.com
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Technical Support & Web Development

Received on Friday, 25 May 2001 14:51:04 UTC