Technique F82:Failure of Success Criterion 3.3.2 by visually formatting a set of phone number fields but not including a text label

Applicability

Any technology

This technique relates to 3.3.2: Labels or Instructions (Failure).

Description

This failure ensures that people with visual or cognitive disabilities will recognize phone number fields and understand what information to provide to fill in the fields. Phone numbers are frequently formatted in fixed, distinctive ways, and authors may feel that just providing visual formatting of the fields will be sufficient to identify them. However, even if all the fields have programmatically determined names, a text label must also identify the set of fields as a phone number.

Examples

Example 1

In the United States, phone numbers are broken into a three digit area code, a three digit prefix, and a four digit extension. A web page creates fixed length text input fields for the three parts of the phone number, surrounding the first field with parenthesis and separating the second and third fields with a dash. Because of this formatting, some users recognize the fields as a phone number. However, there is no text label for the phone number on the web page. This is because the label for each field will be the closest preceding text, so the three fields would be labeled "(", ")" , and "-" respectively.

Tests

Procedure

  1. For each set of phone number fields in the web page that represents a single phone number, check that the set of fields are labeled with a visible text label that is positioned near the set of phone number fields.
  2. For each set of phone number fields in the Web page that represent a single phone number, instructions are provided about how to fill in the fields.

Expected Results

  • If both check #1 and check #2 are false, then this failure condition applies and the content fails this success criterion.