Style and Accessibility for HTML Forms

The form styling templates provided in the tutorial utilize two HTML form-specific elements for defining the structure of the form: label and fieldset.

For usability and accesibility reasons, every form element on a page should have an associated label. Not only do labels let you focus a form element by clicking on its label text (no more fiddling around clicking on the exact circle that is the radio button), but they enable non-visual browsers to create an association between the label text and the form element, allowing each distinct item to be more readily identified.

We have been looking at making the MidCOM editing forms more accessible. This solution is starting to look really good. Time to post a bug?

Examples like the columnar form also throw Rambo's notion that OpenPSA couldn't be built using MidCOM datamanager because it uses very strict form layouts out of the window.

Via Web Standards Project.

Updated 9:56: Posted bug #50 to get MidCOM datamanager to support this way of building forms.

Updated 2004-05-24: Torben accepted this enhancement into the roadmap for MidCOM 1.4.0


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