Django: assign accesskey to label instead of select

Question

Hi, i'm developing a site that must be as accessible as possible. While assigning the accesskeys to my form fields with widget=FieldWidget(attrs={'accesskey':'A'}) i found out that the w3c validator won't validate an xhtml strict page with an accesskey in a select tag. Anyway i couldn't find a way to assign an accesskey to the label related to the select field (the right way to make the select accessible). Is there a way to do so?

Thanks

Answer 1

Interesting question. HTML 4.01 also prohibits accesskey in a select.

I believe the Short Answer is: Not in standard Django.

Much longer answer: I looked at the code in django/forms/fields.py and .../widgets.py and the label is handled strictly as a string (forced to smart_unicode()). Four possible solutions come to mind, the first three are not pretty:

1. Ignore the validation failure. I hate doing this, but sometimes it's a necessary kludge. Most browsers are much looser than the DTDs in what they allow. If you can get the accesskey to work even when it's technically in the wrong place, that might be the simplest way to go.

2. Catch the output of the template and do some sort of ugly search-and-replace. (Blech!)

3. Add new functionality to the widgets/forms code by MonkeyPatching it. MonkeyPatch django.forms.fields.Field to catch and save a new arg (label_attrs?). MonkeyPatch the label_tag() method of forms.forms.BoundField to deal with the new widget.label_attrs value.

   I'm deliberately not going to give more details on this. If you understand the code well enough to MonkeyPatch it, then you are smart enough to know the dangers inherent in doing this.

4. Make the same functional changes as #3, but do it as a submitted patch to the Django code base. This is the best long-term answer for everyone, but it's also the most work for you.

Update: Yoni Samlan's link to a custom filter (http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/693/) works if you are generating the <label> tag yourself. My answers are directed toward still using the full power of Forms but trying to tweak the resultant <label>.