Labels and Accessibility

What does a screen reader say when it reaches a text box? A screen reader is a program that reads a page aloud for people who cannot see the screen, and when it moves to a form field, it announces the kind of field and the field's name. That name is not the name attribute the server receives. It is the text a person would use to describe the field, called its accessible name, and on a well-built form it comes from a <label> element.

When a field has no label and nothing else names it, the screen reader can announce only that it found a text box