Hey everyone. Josh here with Online ADA, and in this video we’re covering article 3.3.2–Labels or Instructions. This is a single level A requirement, and I’ll jump into the description.
“Labels or instructions are provided when content requires user input.” It’s real easy. This article overlaps with a few other articles, in fact, such as 1.3.1–Info and Relationships, and 4.1.2, which is making sure that everything is programmatically tied together. But 3.3.2 is actually very specific. It simply says that if there are extra instructions or we have some element on the page that the user can interact with, then we have some sort of label for it, especially when it’s referring to inputs.
This is actually most of the time–when we’re talking about this particular article–if we have a select drop down box, a check box, we have a text area, we have a newsletter sign up… This isn’t so much for buttons or links as it is for those inputs in a form. This simply says that we need some sort of visual, textual representation of what this input does, and if there are extra information, then we need to explain that as well using these labels or instructions.
So, essentially what you will most commonly see is in an input field. You’ll have, for instance, the input field requires a username or let’s say an email. That’s a really easy one. Then right above it it’ll say “Email” in big, bold text, right? That’s just a really standard way of providing a label. This doesn’t talk about how your markup would look or how you’re associating the two. In fact, to meet this criterion it literally just has to be on the page nearby, in proximity. In addition to the label, if we have extra information that we need to relay to the user–like a specific format, for instance, on a form field–then that text is also present somewhere nearby as well, most likely right underneath the label itself.
And that’s all there is for this. We have a textual representation of what the input is or what is required from the user and then extra information is there as well.
That’s the instructions part of that. So thank you very much for joining me in this article and I’ll see you in the next.