07Jun2006

Form Labels: Better With Colons or Without?

Here's a subject I haven't given much thought about before. Usability News has a couple of interesting articles about whether not to include colons at the end of form labels.

The first looks at the issue purely from a usability perspective. The follow-up article looks at the question from an accessibility standpoint.

The author's conclusion from the first article is that it doesn't matter as long as you are consistent:

The fact is that in over 15 years of testing all sorts of forms … NEVER ONCE has any user commented on the presence or absence of colons. They don’t notice them. They don’t care. And so I have learned not to care either.

Her conclusion regarding the accessibility of colons in labels is the same; it doesn't seem to matter. Here's the response of an accessibilty consultant she contacted about the JAWS screenreader:

I have watched people using a screen-reader on forms, but I do not recall whether the forms had colons on the screen or what the tags for the fields said.

Micro-topics

I enjoy articles like these which thoroughly explore a very small web design-related topic.

Reminds me of the Man in Blue's post (and discussion) about what separator to use in page titles and this one, The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator.

There are also numerous articles about what separators to use in breadcrumb trails. The (almost) standard appears to be > by the way.

Question: Are there other good examples of really detailed explorations of a minute aspect of web design?

Posted on: June 7, 2006 | 5 Comments

5 Comments Posted

I always wonder when writing a sentence that finishes with a link, should the link contain the full stop or should it be after the closing anchor tag?

It's a mystery !

1. Posted by Gary on June 07, 2006

Gary - we've discussed just this in our team and have decided not to include the period or full-stop in the link. After all, it doesn't add any value to the link from a content perspective and it doesn't look as nice.

My preferred solution is not to end sentences with links, thus avoiding this problem, but that doesn't always work.

2. Posted by Christian Watson on June 07, 2006

I agree. I don't notmally include the full stop in a link if it's at the end of a sentence. It just doesn't look right to do it that way. I guess it's a matter of opinion though at the end of the day.

As long as you are consistent.

3. Posted by Ben on June 08, 2006

Well, there you have it. By an overwhelming majority of 3-0 we have introduced a new design convention:

Don't include periods in links that fall at the end of a sentence.

Now, how to get it into the W3C spec…?

4. Posted by Christian Watson on June 08, 2006