Hi,
From: Lachlan Hunt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I believe the issue is with the way screen readers handle existing forms.
The problem is that each radio button or checkbox has it's own label, but
the whole group is often associated with a single question and there is no
way mark that up.
e.g.
<p>Gender:
<label for="m"><input type="radio" id="m" name="gender" value="m">
Male</label>
<label for="f"><input type="radio" id="f" name="gender" value="f">
Female</label>
</p>
In this case, when screen readers are in forms mode and the user is tabbing
between form controls, it will only read out "Male" and "Female", it won't
read out "Gender:".
In this specific case, that's probably not a major issue because male and
female are fairly self explanitory, but there are many cases where it's
not.
There are workarounds using fieldset and legend for the question, like
this.
<fieldset>
<legend>Gender:</legend>
<label for="m"><input type="radio" id="m" name="gender" value="m">
Male</label>
<label for="f"><input type="radio" id="f" name="gender" value="f">
Female</label>
</fieldset>
I thought this was exactly what fieldset was designed to do. Group related
form controls. Why do you consider it a workaround?
Because of the way screen readers work, they now read out "Gender: Male"
and "Gender: Female" as they tab to each control.
This example demonstrates this technique.
http://www.alistapart.com/d/prettyaccessibleforms/example_3/
The problem with that technique is that, because of the way legends are
rendered in browsers, styling is somewhat restricted.
I'd propose fixing the styling issues instead of changing the markup.
Alternatively screen readers could be made smarter, also without changing
the markup. Consider:
<p>Gender: <label><input name=g value=m type=radio> male</label>
<label><input name=g value=f type=radio>
female</label></p>
Now the screen reader finds a group of radio buttons not in a fieldset.
Radio buttons almost always have a question assigned to them. So go up a
level in the tree (to the P) and get its child text nodes or .textContent or
something, and use that as the "legend" for the radio group. (I'm not saying
this algorithm is fool-proof, just saying that we don't necessarily need to
change the markup to solve this issue.)
Regards,
Simon Pieters
_________________________________________________________________
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