Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
From the behavioral point of view: The purpose of a LABEL control is to
redirect focus on click. It does not make much sense with a TEXTAREA
control that is usually big enough to click upon.
That is not /the/ purpose of a LABEL element, but merely one way in
which user agents can use LABEL. Another use is for a screen reader to
label particular fields accurately, especially important when hopping
between fields.
From a semantic point of view: the TEXTAREA control is special because it
does not make sense to ask whether the content of the TEXTAREA is or even
contains some fixed text because the user may express the same meaning with
different words; its content may be stored but you have to use advanced text
analysis tools (such as a human reader) to process it if you need to. You
can use a label to define what you expect the user to enter into the
control; the TEXTAREA control is so special that it seems obvious that it
needs a caption or some introductory explanation, not a label (except for
the labels "Your message" and "Your text", which are possible but not very
informative indeed.)
Some uses of TEXTAREA are straightforward, some are complex. All benefit
from the addition of a LABEL.
It would probably help if we could associate short labels and longer
descriptions with form fields. It would certainly help if we could do so
with fieldsets:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wacblog/general-accessibility/too-much-accessibility-fieldset-legends/
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
