Hello Courtney, The colon issue is one of the classic debates in UI design and it has raged since the early 1990s.
I generally agree with Caroline, but if you have fields that are read-only with no 3D appearance, the colon can serve as an indicator that some text will follow. The colon serves to differentiate label from text (since in some cases there may be no text by the label and the label will look like a lost piece of text). Another consideration is whether you are following the particular style. I believe that the Vista guidelines call for a colon so if you are following Vista, you might want to follow that style. Chauncey On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Jordan, Courtney <cjor...@bbandt.com>wrote: > Could anyone help me on the subject of whether to use colons after field > labels. I have found one accessibility paper and a few other > not-so-respected sources that indicate that colons after field labels > help screen reader users, as well as normal vision users, to expect an > input field. However, after years of including colons after field > labels, our copy dept now maintains that a colon is punctuation and > shouldn't be included after field labels. I've also found Jarrett's, "No > one cares about colons but UX people" and Luke W doesn't mention it in > his book :(. Has anyone fought this battle before? Do you have any > sources that you could point me to? > > Thanks in advance, > Courtney Jordan > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
