Understanding Label in Name

Intent

The intent of this Success Criterion (SC) is to help ensure that people with disabilities who rely on visual labels can also use those labels programmatically. Controls are often labeled with visible text. Controls also have a programmatic label, known as its Accessible Name. Users have a much better experience if the visible text labels of controls match their accessible names.

Speech input users can navigate by speaking the visible text labels of menus, links and buttons that appear on the screen. It’s confusing to speech input users when they say a visible text label they see, but the speech input does not work because the accessible name that is enabled as a speech input command does not match the visible label.

In addition, when the accessible name is different from the visible label, it essentially becomes an unknown hidden command for speech input users that can be accidentally activated without the user knowing what has happened.

Text-to-speech users will also have a better experience if the text they hear matches the text they see on the screen.

This issue is even more important for speech input and text-to-speech users who also have cognitive challenges. It’s an extra cognitive load for a speech input user to remember and say a speech command that is different from the visible label they see on a control. It’s also an extra cognitive load for a text-to-speech user to absorb and understand speech output that does not match the visible label.

Benefits

Examples

Resources

Techniques

Sufficient

Advisory

If an icon has no accompanying text, consider using its hover text as its accessible name

Failure