Attempt to guess the label for unlabelled form fields on web pages

[chris1988]

is it at all posible to have nvda read the titles of a form field. when going to fill out a form such as on:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?service=mail&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2Fe-11-10ca38dcb38a7e30861186cae6d0522b-d070ccae47d4bd7d2b6600c9e6c69e02aa32349b&type=2
is it at all posible to have it read "first name" last name etc? without having to turn vitural buffers off and back on.

[jteh]

These fields are not correctly labelled. If they were, NVDA would read the names. Observe, for example, that NVDA correctly reads the names of the fields in Trac.

There is no reliable way to determine a label for a field when the page author has not specified a label correctly. Some other screen readers use the previous piece of text, but this is not always correct. Indeed, I have observed cases where such incorrect reporting is actually very confusing.

I am leaving this open for discussion as to whether "guessing" the name for such fields is something we want to implement. While the fault is really with web pages, I understand that there are unfortunately far too many pages that don't correctly label form fields. However, I would argue that potentially incorrect reporting is perhaps worse.

[chris1988]

Replying to jteh:

These fields are not correctly labelled. If they were, NVDA would read the names. Observe, for example, that NVDA correctly reads the names of the fields in Trac.

There is no reliable way to determine a label for a field when the page author has not specified a label correctly. Some other screen readers use the previous piece of text, but this is not always correct. Indeed, I have observed cases where such incorrect reporting is actually very confusing.

I am leaving this open for discussion as to whether "guessing" the name for such fields is something we want to implement. While the fault is really with web pages, I understand that there are unfortunately far too many pages that don't correctly label form fields. However, I would argue that potentially incorrect reporting is perhaps worse.

I really cant think of anything or any way to improve on this. do you want me to shut the ticket? Does anybody else have any ideas?