Wrapping poll options in <label> tags

Post Reply New Topic

I know that this is almost definitely not going to be fixed, but this is a very annoying thing.

When you are doing a poll with radio buttons(the little dots next to the poll options), if you put <label> before the button and </label> after the poll option, the full text functions as a button and you can click on it to select that button. If you leave these out, people have to move their mouse(or their finger, if using a touch device) all of the way over to the left and click/tap on the dot. It takes drastically more effort to click that dot than it would take to click on the words.

Putting the poll options inside <label></label> tags would improve the functionality of this site and would make almost no noticeable change except to people who understand what I'm referring to.

Good idea. I'd never noticed that only the radio buttons were clickable. I doubt Alex will change this old version of the software though as a new version is under development. Maybe you should add you suggestion to the thread about the appearance of the new software?

Hmm, I see what you mean but AFAIK this is working correctly as designed - radio button functionality in a GUI is normally active only on the button itself.
It's still a good idea though and probably forms part of a wider need for better interoperability of GUI control elements with mobile devices.
But changed in this version? Well, you're right: it's unlikely...

That depends on the operating system you're using. On Macs, radio buttons, checkboxes, pop-up menus and other form elements can almost always(in over 99% of cases) be activated by clicking on their respective labels(and I believe that was the case even with Classic Mac OS, going back well into the 1990s or 1980s). On the Mac OS it is standard that element labels are clickable. On Windows and in many common desktop environments in Linux-based operating systems, that's usually not the case. Labels have been part of the HTML standard since the HTML 4 standard, which was published in 1997, almost 20 years ago.

The use of labels to improve ease of use is also common on many major well-designed sites:

https://ssl.reddit.com/prefs/

http://slashdot.org/

Amazon.com(for instance, on its sign-in page)

even the phpbb development forums

I think the reason that most Windows users and Linux users don't include clickability on labels is because they don't know it's an option, and not because it's a standard interface convention not to have them.

Last edited by matt on 20 Jan 2014, 6:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[X] Yes, I understand that clicking these words could have the same effect as clicking the dot to the left of them, but I really don't see any need to change the way it works now.

Ok, thanks - I didn't know that, coming from a Linux/Windows background.
It always seemed to be a case of "there's the visual representation of a button to click, so that's what's made active", but there's really no reason why it can't be the whole label.

For touch screens too - I've started using my Surface RT a lot more lately.