„Usability and accessibility are all the rage right now and that’s great because it’s slowly making the web a better place. Unfortunately, some of the goodies in our bags of tricks aren’t quite up to snuff when it comes to these two areas. One such goody is the good old select element–specifically with the multiple attribute enabled. How about we do away with them and try something different?
The biggest problem with multiple-select boxes is that selecting multiple options is a pain, especially if there are enough to create a scrollbar within the box. The most common place I’ve seen this scenario is in content management systems. For example, let’s say you are writing an article for a site in a CMS and want it to appear in several categories on the front end of a site. (Let’s assume that the system is not using tags for this example.) To related it to these categories, a multiple-select box is usually shown with all the categories of the site as options. You would have to hold down Ctrl and select each category. This may include scrolling within the box and if you love using the handy dandy scroll wheel on mice, then you may click in the box again to enable focus and start scrolling down–but wait! You just clicked without holding Ctrl so you just deselected all the previously-selected options. Now you have to go back and remember what you picked and use the scroll bar to scroll down. Sure, you set focus to the element by selecting the elements with Ctrl but not everyone knows that. All this backing and forthing gets to be a real pain. More about the perils of select boxes can be found at YourTotalSite’s Multi-Select Lists vs. Checkboxes.“
C82 & art, the web, and everything in between
C82 & art, the web, and everything in between