Marking up help text in forms

Zoe asked a question on Twitter recently:

‘Sfunny — I had been pondering this exact question. In fact, I threw a CodePen together a couple of weeks ago.

CodePen Embed - Form field accessibility question

Visually, both examples look the same; there’s a label, then a form field, then some extra text (in this case, a validation message).

The first example puts the validation message in an em element inside the label text itself, so I know it won’t be missed by a screen reader — I think I first learned this technique from Derek many years ago.

<div class="first error example">
 <label for="firstemail">Email
  <em class="message">must include the @ symbol</em>
 </label>
 <input type="email" id="firstemail" placeholder="e.g. you@example.com">
</div>

The second example puts the validation message after the form field, but uses aria-describedby to explicitly associate that message with the form field — this means the message should be read after the form field.

<div class="second error example">
 <label for="secondemail">Email</label>
 <input type="email" id="secondemail" placeholder="e.g. you@example.com" aria-describedby="seconderror">
 <em class="message" id="seconderror">must include the @ symbol</em>
</div>

In both cases, the validation message won’t be missed by screen readers, although there’s a slight difference in the order in which things get read out. In the first example we get:

1. Label text,
2. Validation message,
3. Form field.

And in the second example we get:

1. Label text,
2. Form field,
3. Validation message.

In this particular example, the ordering in the second example more closely matches the visual representation, although I’m not sure how much of a factor that should be in choosing between the options.

Anyway, I was wondering whether one of these two options is “better” or “worse” than the other. I suspect that there isn’t a hard and fast answer.

This was originally posted on my own site.