I work for a state university; which requires our websites to be compliant with Section 508 guidelines. It is not that much of a work you have to do; if you follow a few things while you are coding. One of the requirements of this guideline is; if you have checkboxes and no text next to them (think like a table where in the column header it says:”Click if you will attend”; and checkboxes in each row); then these checkboxes should have title attribute with a description value. The reason behind this requirement is; if a blind user is visiting your page; they wont see the table layout; and relate the checkbox with the column header. So in this application that I was working on; I had asp.net checkboxlist control on the page; and in the codebehind file I was creating the ListItems dynamically and adding them to checkblostlist as below:
ListItem li = new ListItem(String.Empty, program.ID.ToString());
li.Attributes.Add("title",program.Name);
listProgramCoordinator.Items.Add(li);
It is a simple code that just inside a loop; ListItems are created; adding the title attribute to them; and then they are being added to CheckBoxList. I was so sure that the above code will generate “<input type=”checkbox” title=”… I didn't even test it.
A few days after the code was published; our compliance officer called me; and reminded me that I needed to put the title attribute to the checkboxes !!!. I opened the website in my browser; and checked page source view; and was shocked. The asp.net framework was wrapping the checkbox with a span block; putting the title to the span block; and not putting any titles to checkboxes; so what i was getting: “<span title=”some title”><input type=”checkbox”…. I could get around this; so I decided to send an email to Scott Hanselman who is really a great guy and helpful person. He kindly forwarded my email to some other people at Microsoft probably working at the ASP.NET team. Scott Galloway contacted me; and told me that this is a bug with checkboxlist which is an old control hence does not follow the pattern of adding controls for each row. After Scott Galloway; Eilon Lipton sent an email too; this time he gave some explanation why this control does not work. Here is his explanation:
"
The CheckBox has two collections of attributes:
1. The “Attributes” collection that gets applied to the <span>
2. The “InputAttributes” collection that gets applied to the <input>
Unfortunately the CheckBoxList only allows you to modify Attributes and not InputAttributes.
“
So to cut the long story short; both advised me to use a repeater to generate checkboxes; which I could do; but I also asked help from my friend James Johnson before I contacted Scott Hanselman. He helped me and coded a simple jquery function that iterates through the checkboxes; getting the title from the wrapping span tag; removing it from there to checkboxes.
I thank everybody who helped me.