Living Reflections from a Dream

Yes, I did just spend 15 minutes attempting to find out if there should be a line of space between "Select One" and "Option One" in a dropdown on our site. Yes, I did. And it's a highly contentious issue... factors that must be considered (with a number of people):

with the space, the number of options causes the user to have to scroll to see the last one. We don't want to seem like we are discriminating against the option starting with "W" do we?

a screen reader* will read the line as a "space", thus blind people will have to hear that extra word while listening to the site

there is no consistency to this across any of our web sites - some dropdowns have the space, some do not. Some use the abbreviations for words, some do not. A recommendation comes: Perhaps there should be a project to standardize this. Note: I'm all for this, as long as I don't have to be involved

If there is no space, people may get confused and thing "Select One" is one of the options. What happens if they pick that?

This is my life? This is what I spent years in school for? To deal with insane people?

I'm waiting for the inevitable meeting on this that will be called - and the subsequent weekly meeting on the status of making everyone consistent.

* a screen reader is software primarily used by blind people. It "reads" sites to them and they can listen to navigation options, the text, etc. The one we use to test with is especially funny as it has a robot voice, but you can select from a number of options as to what you would like the voice to sound like. Cracks me up that some one thought of that.-----
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