Accessibility: Label Missing on Search

Hi,
the solution to the problem of the label missing in search box is trivial if you are able to insert one line of code in search.module.
You can find at http://pietrocap.altervista.org/?q=node/12 an article about this issue.

Confirmed

Attached patch applies as per comment #1 link

Patch works on fresh HEAD.

Would it be better to let the users decide whether they want a label for the search box? Aesthetics is one thing and accesibility is another. Probabaly a checkbox to show or hide the search box label?

@edkwh: we must avoid things that could be considered "features", as a new option checkbox would be.

No need to avoid, lets mark it a feature then. It's really not a bug anyway.

Nice, patch still applies :)

RTBC.

The usability of a standard box + search button is good enough for non-impaired users, and the extra label would undoubtedly break many existing themes. isn't there a way to improve accessibility without having a visible label in the normal output? We could always set it position: absolute; left: -1000em; and even provide a standard CSS class for such accessibility hints.

imo it should be up to the individual theme to hide this label. Honestly it doesn't seem like much of a burden to possibly re-style a label when upgrading themes to d6.

I'm not sure what accessibility is being added here since the button already says this. And while the argument can be made that it's easy to style the label out, it's equally easy to add the label through either a form_alter, a css :before (not 100% browser compatible, but works), or by theming theme_search_theme_form.

-1

Well, I agree that it gets better on screen readers, if there is an actual label to read out/jump to when navigating the interface, even if this label is not displayed with whatever technology (negative margins for example). Those not concerned with accessibility or can't stand this label there can display:none it or can form_alter it out. This is a long standing debate, and as people pointed out, we are getting more and more customizability options, so this is less of a push on the actual site implementors.