Using form elements outside of a form

Why would form elements appear outside of a form? Our typical use-case is an image carousel. In bare plain markup this is nothing more than an list of linked image elements. When we introduce JavaScript we can turn this plain list into an animated photo-gallery. A carousel of images a visitor can either let auto-scroll, or offer the visitor the option of manually scrolling through the images.

The practical use of image carousels

One particularly elegant use of scrollable image carousels is Flickr’s picture sorting tool. It allows a visitor to sort his uploaded photographs into sets and then annotate them either individually or in groups. The image carousel is a powerful metaphor for navigating through potentially thousands of images.

Another top notch demonstration of an image carousel is Apple’s Coverflow implementation which first surfaced as a means of scanning album covers in it’s much regarded iTunes media application.

Using the appropriate markup

It is clear we need buttons for navigating forwards and backwards through our list of images. Many developers use anchor links styled to emulate buttons, but a better method is to use a button element. The button element offers all the functionality of the simple link, plus you get the default button states for free. So semantically, a button element is the appropriate element to use as a button.

Is it valid?

The immediate retort I hear is that form elements only belong inside a form, because otherwise it isn’t valid HTML. Surprisingly, the HTML 4.01 Strict Recommendation doesn’t impose this limitation at all. Form elements are not limited to being children of a form. The DTD also doesn’t impose this limitation, and an English translation of it goes something like this:

All input related-elements (input, select, textarea, label, button) belong to a group called ‘Form Controls’. The Form Control group is just a subset of inline elements.

This means that anywhere an inline element can validly go, so too can a form control element.

There are some exceptions, for example you can’t place a form control inside of a button element.

What is even more surprising is that the fieldset element also doesn’t have to be inside a form.

I suspect that allowing form elements and fieldsets to exist validly outside of a form isn’t an error by the HTML Working Group, but a particularly insightful forward thinking about the various alternate uses of these form input elements.

Multiple video-player like widgets

Many rich media pages on the web contain not just one single image carousel, but sometimes more than one. They also can contain similar enhanced widgets like video players, audio players, animation.

HTML5′s Canvas will probably be used as a means of visualising realtime data, like showing the spread of “swine flu” across the globe over time (with time annotated text-equivalents). It would be immensely useful to be able to move forward and backward through time and understand how the infection spreads at each time point. We would need buttons to allow a visitor to do that.

Multiple remote controls

We quickly land in a situation where we may have more than one set of video-player controls, each one controlling a different widget or collection of content. (Much like every living room having multiple remote controls, and it’s a perennial game to remember which remote controls which device).

On the web we run into a two fold problem for screen reader users in particular:

• It is difficult to determine which set of video player controls controls which group of content. Being adjacent to the actual content is sometimes not sufficient
• In forms mode these buttons are perceivable to the visitor, and without the surrounding context it is difficult to understand the purpose of these buttons.

The forms mode issue

It could be argued that buttons outside of forms should not be accessible in forms mode, but I find that argument has little merit because the buttons on the page still have a purpose to the user, and that equivalent should still be available to the screenreader user.

Otherwise we are not providing an equivalent experience. The interaction with video-player like controls doesn’t automatically mean that the output is visual only. We must not make that mistake.

Grouping buttons by fieldsets

To improve the accessibility of groups of buttons we wrap each group of buttons in its own fieldset. And every fieldset has to have a legend element that provides a succinct and short description of the collection of buttons.

Carefully chosen legend

The legend text must be carefully thought out. It must be long enough to remove doubt about the purpose of the set of buttons that follow, but short enough for it not to be frustrating when prefixed before the description of every button.

Dynamic legend text

But at this point, the buttons only make sense in a JavaScript context because the behaviour depends on JavaScript being available. Which means those buttons should added to the page by JavaScript, and consequently we can do the same for the legend and fieldset elements.

This adds another dimension to the legend text; it can be altered on the fly by JavaScript through a corresponding set of JavaScript events.

For example, when the visitor first focuses on an element inside of a fieldset, the default legend text can be an appropriate description of the purpose of these button controls. As the visitor then interacts with the buttons the legend can be updated on the fly to present more pertinent information, like the date of the currently displayed epidemic growth map, or some state information like the user is seeing the first four pictures of twenty.

Building on previous ideas

Dirk Ginader used this technique of updating legend text on the fly very successfully in Yahoo Finance’s accessible currency converter.

Acknowledgements

Once again, as with so many other fine accessibility innovations at Yahoo, the credit and initial idea of using fieldsets in this way was suggested by fellow Yahoo colleague, Artur Ortega, one of the real practical experts in web accessibility. He is a fertile source of excellent and creative ideas of improving the accessibility of interactive and rich media components. A true gem of an engineer.

The dotted outline on links is the main visual cue to where the current keyboard focus is on a page at any one time. By tabbing or shift-tabbing through the document the focus is set on the next or previous focusable elements.

This focus rectangle is removed because it makes things look unsightly, but they serve a very useful purpose. And that purpose is critical for a keyboard user to find their way through a page.

So it is essential that there is a clear focus indicator, both on links and form fields. Clear enough that a visitor looking at the page for the first time can spot where the keyboard focus is as quickly as possible.

We do this though CSS’ :focus pseudo-class on the target element. For example, to change the background colour of a link when it receives focus we use the following:

a:focus {
    background-color: #aaf;
}

We can do the same with input fields:

input:focus {
    background-color: #aaf;
}

In each case, the background colour of the focusable element changes colour when it received focus, and that background colour changes back when the element loses focus. By making this background color change enough it is possible for a visitor to find the focused region of the page.

The same argument can also apply to when links are active, using the :active pseudo-class. An active link is one that is in the process of being clicked, so for example when the mouse-button is being held down when over a link and just about to be lifted, this link is seen to be active. Using this active pseudo-class to style an element that is active provides a visible cue about what is going to happen.

a:active { color: red; }

And, we often overlook the usefulness of setting a visited link colour (with the :visited pseudo-class). This proves very helpful in distinguishing destinations a visitor has already been to, thus simplifying the choice of which link to try next.

a:visited { color: purple; }

A common pitfall is that certain browsers need these pseudo-classes in a specific order so as not to have one pseudo-class override the styles of another. The safest pseudo-class order is :link, :visited, :hover, :focus and then :active:

a:link { color: blue; }
a:visited { color: purple; }
a:hover { color: magenta; }
a:focus { color: magenta; }
a:active { color: red; }

The difficulty comes when you need to add some supplementary information to an input field, or you need to provide a text equivalent to a non-text way of labelling a form field. Sometimes having one label per form field is a little messy, and can create accessibility problems when a visual requirement needs to be met.

The title attribute is mostly overlooked and underused. It is little known, but screenreaders read out the title attribute on form fields when in forms mode, even if titles are not read out by default. It’s an exception to the general configuration.

Multiple choice questions

Many surveys offer a list of multiple choice questions where the possible answers are the same for each question. This type of form is normally marked up in a tabular-looking fashion, where the question is a row header, and the possible answers are labeled by a column header.

Marking this up as a table may be the correct semantic way, but the implicit association is not available to a screenreader in forms mode. The only elements that are available in forms mode are form elements (and their attributes). Thus, a form with a tabular structure needs additional markup to make it accessible to screenreader users.

Multiple labels, one per form field

One downside of labels is that one label can only be associated with one input field, so it proves a challenge to markup such a form without resorting to duplicate labels which then need to be hidden from view (and creating a unique id to map each label to its corresponding input field).

Implying column and row headings

Hiding most of the form labels brings another problem to the fore. When column and row headers are used visually to label a field it is visually fairly obvious that a relationship applies horizontally or vertically. There’s a visual cue going on, and sighted people grok this cue almost immediately.

Unfortunately, this cue fails when the entire table cannot be seen in one go. People using screen magnifiers, or very large text sizes, only see a portion of this tabular form. They may not be able to make the visual connection because the column or row header may not be within the viewing region of the screen magnifier when the focus is on a particular form element. The further separated the form element is from its column and row headers, the more difficult it is for the screen magnifier user to figure out what information is being requested by the current form field. Scanning to find the column and row headers for a form field is prone to error, and makes the form more difficult to fill out.

Title attribute as a text equivalent

The overlooked title attribute provides a neat solution to this problem. Screenreaders will read out the title attribute on form elements in forms mode. Every form field with a title has a label that can explicitly identify a particular form field.

Screen magnifiers have the feature of displaying the title attribute when an element receives focus, so when a form field has focus, the title is presented as a tooltip adjacent to the form element. This alleviates the problem of the screen magnifier user scrolling around to determine the purpose of a form field.

Supplementary form field information

Another use of a form field title attribute is to provide supplementary information to a particular field. This can be, for example, a more descriptive variant of an existing label, a reminder that a field is mandatory, an example of a valid input (like the format of a date), or brief help text.

This supplementary information appears as a tooltip when that input field receives focus. This tooltip can be progressively enhanced, or stylistically improved, using JavaScript. The Content Management System Plone makes excellent use of the title attribute and JavaScript to present a visual cue for each for field on a form. This makes a form a little more usable, with very little cost, and that content is available to screenreader users too.

More accessible and usable forms

The title attribute offers an extra avenue for associating text to a form field. It should not be used as the first means of associating a label text with a corresponding form field. In situations where supplementary information is useful, the title attribute is helpful. In some situations where using labels results in masses of duplicated and redundant text that need to be hidden offscreen, it makes sense to use a title attribute instead. As with all accessibility problems, use the solution that best serves the needs of your visitors.

It makes sense to inform screenreader users of these forms – particularly login and search, because they form an important part of getting things done on the site, or navigating to a personalised part of the site.

For that reason, preface all of these forms with a header. This allows screenreader users to use headers as a way of navigating all the elements in the page. Make the header text descriptive, for example “Login to your account”, or “Search this site”. It would be better to integrate these headings as part of the design, but they can be hidden by positioning it off-left if needed.

It’s more natural for this heading is placed before the start of the form, outside the opening form tag. That way a screenreader user can find the relevant header in heading navigation mode, and when they switch back to the normal page navigation mode the first thing immediately after the header is the form.

Ensure that the heading level makes sense in the document structure, and don’t skip a heading level. Use an h2 header for forms that appear before the h1 header; there ideally should be only one h1 header per page.

Related info

• YouTube: Importance of HTML headings for accessibility: shows how useful headers can be as a way of navigating a page of content in a screenreader (JAWS), and the difference when headers are not marked up.