WCAG 2.1 Article 1.3.5 (AA)

Hey, everybody. Josh with Online ADA here, and in this video we’re gonna cover 1.3.5 of the WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines. This is one of the newer articles to come out with the 2.1 update and this is a AA requirement. Let’s go ahead and jump in.

Article 1.3.5, identify input purpose, reads ‘the purpose of each input field collecting information about the user can be programmatically determined when the input field serves a purpose identified by the input purposes for user interface component section- more on that in a minute and the content is implemented using technologies with support for identifying the expected meaning of form input data. That’s a big one. Breaking this article down, what we’re talking about is leveraging the browsers own ability to identify what an input should do and its ability to autofill fields for users.

All we have to do to meet this requirement is match the input name with what the browser is looking for. A great example of this is the first name field or email field, even better. When you have a form that requires an input, if you use the auto complete attribute on the input and you set it equal to email, then the browser now knows that that input should be email and if you have stored any data in your browser from previous forms that you filled out or whatever, then it’s going to auto populate that field for you, and it makes it really handy for people who have short term disabilities with memory or dexterity.

Typing out a big long email can be difficult for some users. And also folks who are dyslexic may have trouble remembering large chunks of data like their address or something like that. So this helps a lot of people and it’s really easy to implement. And just as basically if you have a form field that can be programmatically associated with a specific name then you should be using that.

Now, I mentioned that I would talk more about the input purposes for user interface components.This is a really good link. It’s the only one I’ve seen that actually has the list. It’s in the official documentation and it outlines what each field should have, syntactically, in the auto complete value. So when you say that a different way, the input should have auto complete equals and this article, the input purposes for user interface components, has a whole list of what they should be. Some of them aren’t intuitive, like first name. I believe the value is honorific-name. So you wanna take a look at that, just do a quick Google search for it. You can find it. It’s gonna be your best friend for this article.

That’s all there is to this one, so thanks for joining me and I’ll see you in the next video.