Label positioning

[emma.sax]

I've been trying to find out the reasons behind placing the label to
the right of a checkbox or radio button and came across and old post:

Aesthetically,
[x] an option
[x] another option
looks nice. Everything lined up. But, for a one-dimensional output
medium, such as a screen reader, it makes more sense to have the
labels *before* the input

It has already become the web-wide "standard" to put the checkbox (or
radio button) before the label. It is now irrelevant whether this was bad
practice; even if it were, it has already become good practice by
becoming so universal. If screen readers have problems with it, they need
to adapt to the "standard", and as far as I know, they have done that.

Are there any reasons/documentation to why they came to be positioned
in this way, apart from being aesthetically pleasing? Why has it
become good practice - who first said said this was how we should do
it?

Thanks

M

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I've been trying to find out the reasons behind placing the label to
the right of a checkbox or radio button and came across and old post:

Toby's description of the topic was excellent. From the practical authoring
point of view, there's hardly anything to be added to it.

(Well, with obvious modifications by the "mutatis mutandis" principle: if
the writing direction is from right to left, as it normally is for Hebrew
and Arabic script, then naturally the checkbox or radio button appears to
the right of the label - so that it appears _before_ the label as usual.)

Are there any reasons/documentation to why they came to be positioned
in this way, apart from being aesthetically pleasing? Why has it
become good practice - who first said said this was how we should do
it?

As far as I can remember, it's been an almost ubiquous practice since the
early days (of using forms on web pages). The obvious explanation is that
this was copied from paper forms (and existing electronic forms), where the
purpose is to make the boxes or buttons appear as aligned, in a column.