Guidelines on proximity of labels for improved accessibility

[matatk]

This is interesting work; switches are quite prevalent these days, and having a standard implementation would be helpful. Switches can present some significant accessibility barriers, though. One affects people who zoom in.

It's a popular visual design technique to position labels on one side of the screen and switches on the other. This can result in the switch being quite far away from the label. If the user has a vision impairment and zooms in to see the screen, they can very easily find that the label is not on-screen when they are looking at the switches. As a result, they can't determine which switch does what.

Someone who's zoomed in could see something like this:

Contrast this to checkboxes, where the standard is for the checkbox and label to be in close proximity. It is very clear which checkbox is which.

I noticed that the Microsoft examples linked from the README all have the switches positioned right next to their labels. This is very good practice and it would be great if you could emphasise this in your documentation (if you'd like me to submit a patch, please let me know).