I am in the process of getting some Woody forms approved as WAI compliant.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
While WAI may not be everybody's cup of tea ..... in certain sectors it is a common requirement .... and it is certainly not a bad selling point.
There are three issues which come up regularly with basic Woody forms:
1) Provide an explicit label for each form control. (Level 2)
2) Include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas. (Level 3)
3) Provide a summary for tables. (Level 3)
I am thinking that these are issues which Woody could handle automatically for us.
While there are obviously workarounds for all of these, I think it would be advantageous to make this work as automatically as possible, where it does not interfere with anything.
Issue (1) requires that a form field have a label linked to it:
<label for="name-field">Your Name</label>
<input id="name-field" name="name" title="your name here" type="text" etc. />
While this issue can be solved by wrapping the <label> tags around your <wt:widget-label>s in your template, if WoodyTransformer were changed to preserve the <wt:widget-label> tag instead of consuming it, then the Woody StyleSheets were modified to recognise that tag, Woody could handle this WAI issue out of the box.
Issue (2), placeholder text, is slightly more complicated. I think we would have to introduce the concept of a default value to Woody's field markup, with the *option* to automatically invalidate fields which had their default values in.
Furthermore, I suspect it would be best if such fields had JavaScript like the following in them, when they have been populated with a default value that is not allowed by the validation:
<input name="sample-field"
value="default value"
onfocus="if (this.value == 'default value') this.value = '';"
onblur="if (this.value == '') this.value = 'default value';"
etc.
/>Issue (3) making sure tables have summaries is easy:
<table summary="this is a summary of the table's contents">
Several widgets in Woody make Tables, I propose that their 'hint' could be used as the summary.
WDYT folks?
Objections, suggestions etc. welcome
regards Jeremy
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