[Irl-dean] Content display control - button or hyperlink?

[Joshue O Connor]

Hi Eoin,

> I have a form with a load of fieldsets in it. It's pretty long, and a lot of
> the fieldsets contain optional fields. To make the form appear less
> intimidating and more usable, what I wanted to do is to initally display only
> the legends of each section/fieldset of the form on screen, and then provide
> some kind of control that allows users to expand/collapse the content of the
> fieldset.

That is one approach, another would be to design the form with the most 
common form elements appearing first and depending on whether the 
contents of some fields had anything in them, or even if you 
alternatively added some check boxes for  user defined preferences; then 
only return form fields that are relevant to the users preferences or 
inputted data.

For example, form fields that were not relevant could be left blank by 
the user and when the form was submitted to the server and parsed - the 
server could see that the presence of the blank fields meant some piece 
of data was irrelevant to this particular user and this information 
could be used to determine what form field elements were therefore 
returned to the client side. You could probably use PHP to do this.

This would effectively stagger the inputting of data around the users 
preferences/requirements creating a more simple and usable form.

<snip>
> My question is this - is it better to use a Form control such as a button to
> do the showing/hiding, as I've done above, or would a hyperlink be better?

Should be doing this at all? For example the show/hide may be useful to 
improve the usability for sighted users but I doubt it would be of use 
for non-sighted users but I could be wrong. The advantage, I guess is 
that including the form controls within the <display:none> selector does 
effectively hide the contents from the screen reader user.

However, I think though some kind of user defined preferences menu at 
the beginning of the form would be best. This would remove the need for 
more complex fieldsets and the need for <display:none> to show or hide 
the form elements as a well marked up form which catered for the defined 
user preferences would mean that all of the form controls that are 
present on the client side are relevant.

> I'd imagine a button is better, since JAWS in forms mode probably wouldn't
> notice a hyperlink - however, lots of sites seem to use hyperlinks to provide
> similar functionality - for example iGoogle.

Yes, this would be a problem as when in forms mode the user will TAB 
through the form elements and probably skip over the hypertext links. 
The user /could/ drop out of forms mode and then "find" the link - as 
some power users do if they are not sure of all the forms contents - but 
this would not be advisable for 1) basic users or 2) as a way to design 
core functionality of an important form this way.

HTH

Josh

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