The way you're applying labels doesn't make the form elements fully accessible. The label should be applied on the text associated with the form element, not just the form element. But there's nothing wrong with adding another label over the form element in order to make the entire area inside the TD
clickable. This is actually desirable in order to give people with motor disabilities a bigger area to click. The <label for="whatever">Your label</label>
is aimed for people who use screen readers to go through the Web form.
Also, there's nothing inaccessible about using JavaScript for enhancing accessibility. JavaScript can be used as long as it degrades gracefully and doesn't stops screen readers from reading the page. Also, there's no way to use CSS to fill the cell height on the older versions of IE (which are still in use by a big number of users) without royally screwing up the look of the page. This said, you should use jQuery to fill the entire TD
. The reason I don't say JavaScript is that jQuery saves you a lot of headaches by hiding a lot of the complex coding that's necessary to make this work across the great majority of browsers.
Here's the fully cross browser accessible jQuery enabled code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Accessible Checkboxes</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$("table > tbody tr").each(function() { // Loop through all table rows
var Highest=0; // We want to find the highest TD... start at zero
var ThisHeight=0; // Initiate the temporary height variable (it will hold the height as an integer)
$($(this).children('td')).each(function() { // Loop through all the children TDs in order to find the highest
ThisHeight=parseInt($(this).height()); // Grab the height of the current TD
if (ThisHeight>Highest) { // Is this TD the highest?
Highest=ThisHeight; // We got a new highest value
}
});
$(this).children('td').css('height',Highest+'px'); // Set all TDs on the row to the highest TD height
});
});
</script>
<style type="text/css">
table {
border: 1px solid #000;
}
td, label {
height: 100%;
min-height: 100%;
}
th {
text-align: left;
}
td, th {
border: 1px solid #000;
}
label {
display: block;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<form action="whatever.shtml" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<table cellspacing="3" cellpadding="0" summary="A description of what's in the table.">
<thead>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Some column title</th>
<th scope="col">Another column title</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td scope="row"><label for="value1">Value 1<br />(a bit more info)</label></td>
<td><label><input id="value1" type="checkbox" /> </label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td scope="row"><label for="value2">Value 2</label></td>
<td><label><input id="value2" type="checkbox" /></label></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>
</body>
</html>
You'll need to download jQuery and put the jquery.min.js
file under a folder named js
.
As you can see in the code, the form has been made fully accessible by adding a table summary
, thead
, th
, scope
, label for
etc. Sure, it wasn't part of what you asked, but I added that as an extra bonus.