Adding labels to forms

The following advice on how to associate form fields with labels is important for your form to pass accessibility checks.

Adding labels ensures that your form is accessible to users irrespective of whether or not your form is within a table.

The relationship between a particular form field and the text associated with the form field should be apparent from the design of the form but for visually impaired users, the connection is not always obvious.

Each form field can be associated with only one label; if you want to associate a single label with more than one form field, you will need to alter your form's design.

Our advice is to build the form as normal and then add labels afterwards:

  1. Create your form as normal - see Creating forms in FrontPage 2000 for more information.

  2. To create a label, the text must be in the same cell as the associated form field. If this is not the case then you must drag the text to the form field cell rather than dragging the form field to the text cell. Position the text so that it appears immediately before or after the form field.

  3. Select both the form field and the label text.

  4. From the main toolbar, select 'Insert', 'Form', 'Label'. There should now be a dotted line around the text indicating that it has become a label associated with the form field. The dotted line won't appear in the browser.

  5. Select and drag the text back to its original position. The label's dotted line should remain visible. As a rule, text labels should appear to the left of text boxes and dropdown menus and to the right of radio buttons and check boxes.

  6. Repeat steps 2-5 for additional form fields.

For further information please contact webeditors.enquiries@lse.ac.uk

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