It sounds like it should be reasonable enough to implement two things that would aid accessibility:

a) When clicking submit and validate fails, give focus to either a list of the validation errors, or the first validation error b) Ensure that all validation errors are placed in the for a field

If I get a chance to implement this for one of my sites, I’ll post the results…. somewhere or another.

This very thing has been on my to-do list for the last few weeks. The data attribute thing specifically. Look for this change in future releases of the plugin (we’ll maintain backwards compatibility of course). If you wanted to, you get help out; just fork on github, implement the new features, and send a pull request. If not, that’s cool. We’ll get to it soon enough.

Aaron

• The class name itself—while workable for our purposes here—becomes completely invalid.
• You lose the ability to style inputs based on their validation.
• Trying to retrofit loose JSON syntax within the value of an attribute with a known purpose is a code smell.

Instead, what if you were to utilize non-descript data attributes, valid in HTML5? Perhaps you could leave the validator key as a class, and pass any arguments via a data attribute of the same name:

<form id="myform">
    <input type="text" class="doesNotContain" data-doesNotContain="qz">
    <input type="submit">
</form>

Then again, if you are concerned about current XHTML validity, the data attributes may not be the way to go. In that case you might be able to get away with splitting up the class name with valid syntax:

<form id="myform">
    <input type="text" class="doesNotContain-qz" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

Yet at this point you would be limiting arguments to a string. I’m sure it was this consequence which led you to the loose JSON format to begin with.

Either way, my preference would be for the data attributes. They separate out the concerns, won’t run the risk of invalidating your class names, and are valid in the markup language that you’ll probably using soon, if not already.