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From the UAWG: Under form validation there is no stipulation that validation errors should be stylable by the page author using CSS and are currently only available as per how the UA styles them unless the page author knows JavaScript. This I see as an issue if browsers simply implement an arbitrary styling that some users find hard to read. As such there needs to be scope for validation errors to be stylable (without relying on JavaScript) or browser implementations to be as readable / accessible as possible (the latter being pretty subjective). My other fear is that if forms validation can not be styled without JavaScript page authors may skip using HTML5 webform validation as it messes up their design. We then get to a situation where we have developers refusing to adopt webforms in HTML5 in favour of their own styled forms which potentially could be inaccessble. Users in turn miss out. Anecdotally I know of a web designer who works predominantly with users with cognitive problems and wont use webforms if they can't easily be styled without JavaScript. Proposal: require that all error validation be stylable by the page author without relying on JavaScript. Not sure if this is in scope of HTML5 or is under UAAG. I'm told this is not so easy for a UA to do and that if we want to make the default error messages styleable, we would need to approach the CSSWG with the problem and have them find a solution to make them styleable. Apparently it could possibly work if they provided some sort of pseudo-element.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: I'm marking this "rejected" because I haven't changed the spec, but I agree in general with these comments, it's just that (as noted in the above description) it's really a CSS thing, so there's not much we can do about it. HTML itself doesn't preclude anything being styleable. On another note, I think it's possible that there is a greater chance that the UA's own native validation reporting is going to be accessible than the author's styled versions. I would argue in fact that in practice having it _not_ be styleable is probably likely to be a better way to make this accessible. Also, it's worth noting that there's nothing that says the validation mechanism must be in the page, so there might not be anything really to style. UAs could make the validation thing be purely audio, for instance. (Not that I'm advocating that, but the spec is media-, device-, and presentation-independent on this.) Anyway, I suggest that we bring this up to the CSS working group when the HTML5 spec is stable (maybe after LC?).
Per the proposal at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Jan/0245.html, the HTML A11Y TF does not plan to formally work on this issue at this time. This does not mean the TF has no interest in it, but does not have immediate plans to work on it. The TF may review the issue in the future.