form label 508 compliance question

Do labels that I create for my form elements need to be in the <form> body? for example would t开发者_如何学编程his be compliant:

<div style="display: none;">
    <label for="somename">Some Name</label>
    <!-- more labels.. //-->
</div>

<!-- insert lots of HTML here //-->

<form>
<input type="text" name="somename" id="somename">
<!-- insert more elems here //-->
</form>

In general, the tag doesn't really provide much semantic meaning unless you happen to have more than 1 form on a page, in which case the form tag indicates what form elements it is associated with.

That being said, tags also do not depend on their location because they are tied to 1 and only 1 other element by that element's ID, so no, it doesn't matter where you put it in relation to the element it is a label for, but it is usually good practice to keep the label near the element. I would question the semantic validity of your page if it drifts too far from the element it describes, and making sure your document is semantic is a key component of being accessible. 508 does only require a best-effort for accessibility, but few and far between are the cases where having a semantic document is too hard to do.

No. Ideally they'd be right next to the element they're related to, but they don't have to be. It is true the 508 standards seem vague; some of that is because there's more than 1 level of compliance you can try to match. I always found the Priority 1 508 compliance to be frustratingly low. You could get away with most anything. The two things I always tried to do (at a minimum) were

1. Run the site or pages through a checker
2. Look at the site in a text-only browser

I think the second step made me a better developer of accessible websites than the first because it became obvious that some common things were frustrating (e.g., having a huge block of navigation links at the top of every page without at least some way to skip them). If you're already checking your sites in a screenreader, you're probably ahead of the game.

If anyone is wondering, I installed Thunder screenreader and the format i provided above is perfectaly accessable.

you can also use

<label class="hideme" for="blah">blah blah</blah>

where

.hideme {
    display: none;
}