I also like the ARIA validation attributes for IE7+ form styling – in this case it’s great to be able to use accessible markup as a means to several ends.

@FlowerMountain – tried to view the Derek Featherston piece but it’s password protected . I have heard him speak before though, and he’s very knowledgeable.

I looked into aria-describedby after listening to a seminar by Derek Featherstone called “In Top Form: designing and building accessible forms”. http://bit.ly/huuxUg

He mentions Aria but doesn’t go into details. I recommend this seminar, I learnt a lot even though I thought I had more Accessibility knowledge thatn the average front-end person.

It’s great that you use Aria but it wasn’t silly at all to use text within the label in the first place, precisely because of the poor support of Aria at the moment. We should use Aria but still think about the users who don’t have access to such extra info or don’t know about it. It’s like with CSS3 and HTML5: progressive enhancement is The Way

There is this great survey done on screen reader users by WebAIM: http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/#landmarks

You’ll see that 42% of these users don’t even know about Aria, and 5% have browsers that don’t support it at all.

Now I’m going to look into aria-labeledby because I still don’t know how to use that one…