Accessibility tip 23: Label form elements
While forms present a special challenge for blind users, the <label> tag makes them a lot easier to use by allowing you:
to associate a form label with any kind of form input element: text box, multi-line text area, checkbox, radio button, whatever. This allows screen readers to intelligently announce what a particular input element is, by reading the label.
The changes to my Movable Type templates took a little longer this time: as well as modifying my Comment Listing, Comment Preview, and Comment Error templates, I had to make the same changes to the Individual Archive Template, since I have inline comments on those pages. (That’s a great reason for specifying Individual as the Preferred Archive Type. It means that your post and any comments appear on the same page.)
In the future, when creating forms in Dreamweaver MX, I’ll take advantage of the Accessibility preference setting that displays an Accessibility Attributes dialog whenever you insert a form element.
As a sidenote:
Netscape 6.0 and 6.1 (and Mozilla prior to some version which I cannot remember) are totally messing up CSS applied to the LABEL element, even causing the LABEL contents to dissapear.
With later versions of Gecko implemented, this was fixed.
More on Gecko bugs with LABEL:
Posted by Kris on 20 July 2002 (Comment Permalink)http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=label&long_desc_type=allwordssubstr&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=substring&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailtype2=substring&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&changedin=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Bug+Number&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=