[thelist] Accessability for web survey questions

M. Seyon evoltlist at delime.com
Fri Oct 28 19:25:46 CDT 2005


Message from Sam Carter (10/28/2005 12:59 PM)

>Are there any special accessibility considerations for coding a <form>
>block which contains a few radio buttons to gather a user's response to
>a survey question?

You might want to consider this snippet of commentary from the spec:

Radio buttons are like checkboxes except that when several share the same 
control name, they are mutually exclusive: when one is switched "on", all 
others with the same name are switched "off". The INPUT element is used to 
create a radio button control.
If no radio button in a set sharing the same control name is initially 
"on", user agent behavior for choosing which control is initially "on" is 
undefined. Note. Since existing implementations handle this case 
differently, the current specification differs from RFC 1866 ([RFC1866] 
section 8.1.2.4), which states:
At all times, exactly one of the radio buttons in a set is checked. If none 
of the <INPUT> elements of a set of radio buttons specifies `CHECKED', then 
the user agent must check the first radio button of the set initially.

Since user agent behavior differs, authors should ensure that in each set 
of radio buttons that one is initially "on".

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.2.1


Having a 'no option selected' button be initially on, while cumbersome, 
best fulfills this requirement in my opinion, as pre-selecting either yes 
or no may be leading and may result in skewed data from people simply not 
answering the question.

regards.
-marc 



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