Labels or instructions

This information relates to criterion 3.3.2 Labels or instructions, which states:

Labels or instructions are provided when content requires user input.

The overall aim of this success criterion is to make sure users know what information they have to enter. It helps all users but especially people with cognitive impairments.

What do you have to do?

I think this is one of the easist and most obvious success criterion. If you have a form field of any kind, where a user is likely to enter a response, you must provide a label or instructions, so they know what to input.

Instructions should be helpful but concise. You're not aiming for War and Peace here. You just want to give enough information so that users don't input the wrong information and then have to try to work out why it won't work.

Example

I think a good example here is passwords with special requirements. You may have a password field with a label saying Password. However, that doesn't give enough information, if the password must be between 8 and 20 characters long, and have at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, a number and a special character.

In this situation, the user might struggle to input an acceptable password and not be able to correct the error. It would be better to provide hint text.

Must be between 8 and 20 characters and contain at least one lower case letter, one upper case letter, one number and one special character.

Related success criteria

This success criterion often gets confused with other related criteria, such as:

  • 1.3.1 Info and relationships
  • 4.1.2 Name, role, value

This criterion is about providing a label or instructions that are visible on the page. It's a content issue. Info and relationships is about making that information, which will probably be presented visually, available to assistive software. Name, role, value is often about how controls are marked up for assistive software but is not so much about what is visible on the page.

When assessing 3.3.2 Labels or instructions, focus on the information on the page and whether or not it helps users to know what to do or what to input in a form field. If it does that, it passes.