: Accessibility Advent: give input elements sensible name attributes

Published at
Thursday 6th December, 2012

(Throughout Advent I’m sharing some hints as to how web developers can make my life as a speech recognition user easier.)

Autocomplete is my friend; things like email addresses are a pain to dictate. I could create a “word” in the Dragon vocabulary for each one I use, but it is vastly easier these days to let my web browser take care of it.

This does require that you play along, however. Use expected names for form inputs wherever possible. (They are scoped by the form itself, so collisions for the fields most likely to benefit from autocompletion won’t be a problem in most situations.) While we’re here, quit asking me to confirm my email address – because that second field usually doesn’t autocomplete.

What do you mean your inputs don’t have name attributes? Facepalm.

There’s a service called Launchrock that lets you take prelaunch interest by collecting emails. It’s simple. It’s cute. It doesn’t work.

Here’s what a keyboard user experiences: an email box plus some shiny information about whatever forthcoming service they are signing up for. Tap tap tap, email entered. Next field: choose a password. (It seems to support other fields, such as name, as well.)

Here’s what I get: the same email box and information. Great; email boxes I can just get the first character into, then up pops the autocomplete list and I select the one I want, which will usually be at the top.

“Press the key Juliet.”

Odd. The “j” is there, but no drop-down. Okay, maybe it triggers on two characters…

“Press the key Alpha.”

Still nothing. At this point I tend to give up. Seriously. Your site hasn’t launched, and when you do it will probably have Twitter or Facebook sign in, so there’s rarely much advantage in getting in early – and someone is bound to tell me about it again. If you’re really lucky, I’ll remember I’d heard of you before. And… I’m gone.

Launchrock’s developers are being clever, progressively revealing fields on a single page using JavaScript. Presumably at some point this gets submitted via Ajax. Apparently they forgot to build the non-JavaScript version first, or even at all; if they had, the inputs would have names, autocomplete would work and I’d be happy.

Please don’t do this. Build it right. (Apparently you can customize Launchrock’s HTML. Do so.)