Support for fieldset/legend

[jongund]

When a form control with proper labeling is encapsulated by a fieldset/legend, the legend content should be appended to the label of the form control.

This is important to provide more context to the user of the form controls purpose in a website and to help make form control labels more unique.

This is also a feature of other commercial screen readers for windows.

[jongund]

Is there any update on the status of this bug fix?

It is hard to tell web developers to use fieldset/legend when it does not have an effect on assistive technology

[jteh]

Appending the text of the legend to the end of every form control's label would be fairly inefficient in terms of verbosity and extremely hacky. However, NVDA already reads new focus ancestors as you move inside them. For example, if you tab into a fieldset in Firefox, you will hear the legend followed by the first form control, but you won't hear the legend again on subsequent tabs. Note that a bug was fixed recently which makes this behaviour more consistent in browse mode.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work in IE8 due to its poor support for accessibility APIs, so any solution there will have to be a work around on our side.

[jongund]

Thank you for the response. I will try in Firefox and IE 9.

If it doesn't work in IE 9, is there a bug that can be reported in IE 9 that would make it work?

[jteh]

Unfortunately, past attempts have made it clear that Microsoft are very unlikely to fix accessibility issues in IE9. We might have a chance of getting it fixed in IE10, though. IN the meantime, we'll probably have to work around the issue with specific code in NVDA.

[mdcurran]

Fixed in changeset:main,4289. IE9 did not properly support this on its own either.