Input elements hold references to their labels
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Today I came across an MDN page which describes the labels property of textarea
elements. I hadn't used this DOM element property before and started playing around with it.
It turns out that input elements (and textareas) hold references to their connected labels.
Assuming you wrote HTML below, you can access the label element using the labels
property. labels
returns a NodeList
with the connected elements.
<label for="foo">Some input</label>
<input type="text" id="foo">
<script>
console.log(document.getElementById('foo').labels);
// NodeList (1) [label]
</script>
I never had a use case for this property, but I bet that accessibility linters use the labels
property quite heavily to validate accessible forms. Label your input elements, friends! Labels are essential to make your forms accessible.
When creating forms, I prefer to place the input elements inside label elements because it increases the clickable area that will focus the input.
Unfortunately, if you place your input elements inside labels, you can't omit the for
attribute because not every screenreader supports "wrapping labels".
I was delighted to find out that the labels
property works fine with this approach, too!
<label>
<span>
Some input
</span>
<input type="text" id="foo">
</label>
<script>
console.log(document.getElementById('foo').labels);
// NodeList (1) [label]
</script>
It even returns multiple labels if you're using several labels for one input element.
<label>
<span>
Some input
</span>
<input type="text" id="foo">
</label>
<label for="foo">Some input</label>
<script>
console.log(document.getElementById('foo').labels);
// NodeList (2) [label, label]
</script>
And that's it! Maybe you're writing an accessibility linter right now – then labels
can be helpful. :)
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