Content Editors: Steps to Ensure Your Form is Accessible

Ensure you've implemented the following best practices to ensure your form is accessible to disabled employees, students, or members of the general public completing your form with assistive technology:

  • Always label your form inputs. A visible label to the left of the input is usually provided by default in a form builder tool. This label should be kept and should not be swapped out with a placeholder within the field. Placeholders have multiple accessibility issues, including color contrast, cognitive, and assistive technology related issues. 
  • Provide clear instructions. Clear instructions can reduce the amount of form errors that can occur, whether there is a character limit or a date must be entered in a specific format. 
  • Make long forms into multiple pages. If you have a longer form with different sections, break the form into multiple pages to give assistive technology users a break between sections. Also give users the ability to save the form as a draft and come back to it later. 
  • Use alternatives to Captchas to secure a form. Captchas are not accessible to many in the disability community and they also create usability issues for non-disabled people. There are several ways to handle spam issues, including using Honeypot, setting rules, creating a custom trivia question, or putting a form behind login that does not require public access. 

Content Editors: Steps to Ensure Your Form is Inclusive

Recommended best practices to ensure you are being inclusive when providing form fields and values:

  • When collecting identifying data that will be used for Customer or Emploeye Relationship Management, ensure you include a Chosen Name, Name Pronunciation, and Pronouns field. 
  • When collecting contact information, always collect both the person's email address and phone number, and then ensure you ask what their contact preference is and whether they require any accommodations. For example, a Deaf employee or customer may prefer to talk via email and text messaging, rather than by phone, or they may prefer a video call with a sign language interpreter or real-time captioner. 
  • When using a form to collect event registration information for an in-person event with food, ensure you ask event attendees if they have any food restrictions. 

Developers: What to Consider When Building a Form from Scratch

  • Use native html form controls. Native html form controls work with assistive technology by default. If you need to create custom controls, please make sure to follow WAI-ARIA techniques to ensure the name, role, and state are communicated accurately to assistive technology users.
  • Ensure all form controls are keyboard accessible. Verify by tabbing through the form. You should be able to access every field and complete each one with keyboard only, including any data picker features. Ensure focus indicators appear as you tab through and that the tabbing order is correct. 
  • Provide error messages. Error messages should be text descriptions that identify which fields are in error (provide as much detail as possible) and receive focus when the error occurs. 
  • Ensure that required fields are communicated to screen reader users. Deque has put together an article on the different options for coding required fields.

Related Resources

Don't Use the Placeholder Attribute, Smashing Magazine.