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by lelandfe 641 days ago
The HTML spec doesn't speak much on a11y guidelines. Here's what the W3's WAI says https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/labels/#associating-l...

> Whenever possible, use the label element to associate text with form elements explicitly

> [..]

> In some situations, form controls cannot be labeled explicitly... Generally, explicit labels are better supported by assistive technology

...but people have been saying that for like 15 years now, I don't know how big of a deal those failures are. That'd be a good blog post
1 comments
dumbo-octopus 641 days ago
Parent link says NVDA, VoiceOver, and JAWS all support the implicit way. That’s the industry standard suite to support, they’re all free and available across all platforms.

If some company makes a shoddy half baked solution for sale (looking at you, Dragon), and they don’t understand basic HTML that has been standardized for years, that’s not my problem. The same way I don’t only use the subset of web technologies that the AOL Premium web browser supports for $10 bucks a month.

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extra88 641 days ago
Yes, all the screen readers handle implicit labels just fine. As the a11ysupport.io tests show, it's Voice Control software that fails, not just Dragon NaturallySpeaking but also the built-in Voice Control in macOS.

I think the implication is these voice control programs aren't using the accessibility tree built by the browser but parsing the DOM themselves, poorly. It's not really surprising for Dragon since it does hardly anything in a browser without its browser extension installed and extensions don't have access to the accessibility tree. It's more surprising for macOS Voice Control.

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dumbo-octopus 641 days ago
Voice Control also works perfectly fine, I just tested it myself on their provided sample. Say "select your name" on this page: https://a11ysupport.io/tests/html/html_label_element_implici...
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extra88 641 days ago
They must have fixed it in Safari 18. I'm running macOS 14.6.1 and at the beginning of the month it didn't work but I also just tried it and now it does.
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acka 641 days ago
JAWS isn't free[1]. Using the trial version for accessibility testing goes against its EULA[2].

[1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/

[2] https://webaim.org/blog/jaws-license-not-developer-friendly/

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dumbo-octopus 640 days ago
Ah, I got it mixed with Orca. NVDA is the thing to target in Windows.
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