What landmark would it be? I can’t think of one that would fit, and not sure if a comment form should need a landmark.

>>Is it necessary to have (required) next to name field, considering that with Firefox and NVDA…

Labels should state whether something is required, yes. Not everyone has a screen reader to tell them there’s a “required” attribute on an input. Labels are also used by sighted people using graphical browsers.

If all AT universally announced that a field was required, then authors could maybe decide to leave the attribute off the inputs and leave it in the labels, who should be accessible to *everyone*.

Also, announcing to a user the moment they touch an input that it’s invalid is stupid and annoying. It’s like telling someone they fail before they’ve even tried, or pointing out the obvious (“the field is currently empty”). It should not be considered invalid until the user has left.

Autocomplete is going to be a problem if all HTML5-parsing browsers make it default. Great, every single e-commerce form now needs to add autocomplete=”off” to everything just to stop the idiocy that is “automatically adding in credit card numbers” and other junk public computers with caching-on browsers would store. Oh the joy.

Oh and I’m still waiting for my promised ability to turn autocomplete and autofocus off on my end. I can turn Javascript off, but haven’t found a way to turn off autofocus or autocomplete. Which one is more accessible? The one *I* can control, and I don’t mean “control by spending 15 minutes crawling through some config file that the browser decides to overwrite next time I start up anyway” either.

Old article, things have changed, maybe it’s time for an update?

Using CSS to style required fields means anyone not getting the styles miss that important information. And any readers who understand the ARIA required role, it should just override the HTML5 required attribute. Does that mean anything for browsers (if they do validation and check for required fields filled while the user is making use of ARIA roles?)?

Autofocussing would be better a setting users can choose themselves for the sites they visit most: say, Google search or a web-based mail site or someplace they always log into first… rather than something set by authors. I don’t like the idea of losing my control of my cursor or my focus. If I’m on a new-to-me page I may not realise where the hell I am right away! Keeping Javascript off helped this, but won’t help when it’s built into the markup. Like bookmarks, I better like the idea of users setting this attribute instead. We know which pages we want to skip to a form field and which ones we don’t.