#88558 - labels being focusable

[Datschge]

On Friday 15 October 2004 18:25, Tobias Anton wrote:
> My point is about accessibility. Everything that can be activated
> by mouse should be activatable via keyboard as well.

Then please check out your code actual behavior. With KDE CVS visiting 
http://www.gmx.net/de/ and playing with the 'GMX Login' box in the 
middle right I can indeed click the 'e-mail' and 'Passwort' labels 
with the mouse, in which cases the keyboard focus is forwarded to the 
respective input fields. With tab-focussable labels many users will 
feel like being stuck in the label, since having to press Enter to 
move on to the respective input field with every other key press 
sucked up is not increasing accessibility. They will enter the name, 
tab once, start typing expecting it to go to the password field, 
notice that the ****ing 'Passwort' label has the focus and all 
inputted text is lost, tab again to get to the password fielöd not 
aware that Enter would do that as well. I would suggest either to 
directly forward the label focus to the respective input field, or at 
least redirect all the keyboard input to there instead just pretend 
that no input to act on actually happened.

As it behaves now the accessibility feature is more a regression than 
a real help (I didn't know about Enter for moving to the linked 
element, and I doubt anybody so far is aware of it, and as an 
additional key press which is usually considered unnecessary I doubt 
it's becoming popular).

> Maybe, however, only those labels need to be focusable that carry a
> for-attribute which points to an element outside the label.

...and not straight after the label but only when some other visible 
text/data is in-between separating label and the linked-to element. 
This is the only case of labels where I can imagine labels being used 
as kind of anchor links when using keyboard navigation might actually 
be useful.

Cheers, Datschge