Broken labels

By bim. In forms that have fairly long implicit labels, the BR element is the worst way to control where the text will wrap. Screen readers may only read the text that comes after the BR element, because of course, it's perfectly legitimate to have a line of instruction, followed by the BR element, followed by the implicit lable.

For example, if a label were: "If you have more than 14 chickens, how many do you own?" Many screen reader users will hear only "how many do you own?" There are two simple ways to avoid this issue.

• Use an explicit LABEL (which has the LABEL element with a FOR attribute which exactly matches an ID attribute in its related form control).
• If (for some strange reason), you don't want to use explicit labels, allow the text to wrap naturally, without the BR element, and use CSS to limit the width of the text block, so that it wraps where you want, at normal text size.