Comments on: Speaking form labels - Summary

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:05:55 +0000

Jaws 6.0 and IE6 - straight through reading mode

Everything is spoken exactly as displayed.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:07:54 +0000

Jaws 6.0 and IE6 - forms reading mode

Interrupted reading, pressed F to find the form, which Jaws read completely. Then tabbed to each control. For each control the legend was spoken and then the label and control contents.

Listen to a recording.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:10:17 +0000

Window Eyes 5.0 and IE6 - straight through reading mode

Everything was read as displayed, but with the addition of the control label being repeated after speaking the current control value.

Listen to a recording.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:15:08 +0000

Window Eyes 5.0 and IE6 - forms reading mode

Interrupted normal reading, used F to find the form which was spoken, then used C to find and speak each control.

When speaking the complete form, each control’s label is spoken twice, once before and once after the control’s current vaule. When speaking individual controls, the label is spoken only once, after the control’s current value.

Listen to a recording.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:27:36 +0000

IBM Home Page Reader 3.04 - straight through reading mode

Information is spoken exactly as displayed.

Listen to a recording.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:30:44 +0000

IBM Home Page Reader 3.04 - form reading mode

Interrupted reading and used Alt+o to move to controls. The legend was spoken once at the start of the form. Each of the other controls spoke the control’s label and value. Each label is spelled out letter by letter due to a known bug.

Listen to a recording.

By: brothercake

brothercake — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 08:42:34 +0000

How come you’re recommending “nosize” as a universally suitable technique, when we know that it fails for some - http://www.access-matters.com/2005/04/24/quiz-527-screen-reader-test-7/

offleft and offtop positioning, fab, but nosize is just as broken as display:none for practical use.

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 10:35:34 +0000

THANKS James! (Brothercake) You are correct. I overlooked the Window Eyes 5.0 failures for nosize. That one has enough market share to recommend against using this technique. I’ll revise the recommendation.

Thanks for catching it.

By: Tobias Bergius

Tobias Bergius — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 13:38:34 +0000

Have you tried using this technique?

label {
font-size: 0;
margin-left: -9999px;
text-indent: -9999px;
}
select {
display: block;
float: left;
}

By: Bob Easton

Bob Easton — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:08:54 +0000

Tobias,
Refer to all the testing done previously. You can see that what you propose is a combination of techniques #7 (nosize), #9 (offleft) and #11 (negative text indent). Using all three is unnecessary overkill. Use only #8 or #11, and let the browser do less work.

By: Top 41 Accessibility Articles : Ultimate Web Developer Lists : eConsultant

Top 41 Accessibility Articles : Ultimate Web Developer Lists : eConsultant — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:26:50 +0000

[…] Speaking form labels - summary […]

By: mush

mush — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:33:26 +0000

I am facing sm issues .
1) How to make JAWS read iframes..in my website i have used iframe for popup’s. so wen a popup comes jaws doest read out which popup comes. i tried by giving a title attribute to the iframe but it doesnt seem to help.
However it reads out for every popup wen im using firefox. i want same thing even in IE.

2) How to make JAWS read LABELS. only label.
i have a label inside a