Accessible Forms & Final Thoughts

Part 3: Accessible Forms & Final Thoughts

[00:00:00]

Accessible Forms

Natalie: All right, we can move along to forms and ways that we can deal with our forms to make those more accessible. Um, first up we’ll talk about the submit button. So by default, this is a gravity forms a screenshot of gravity forms editing a form by default. Of course, the submit button just says submit, but you can edit that very easily in your settings.

So instead of using vague or generic button text, you wanna use informative or descriptive link text that tells the user what will happen when they submit the form. So things like create account, donate, send a message, or subscribe are all helpful things to put on a submit button to reinforce what’s going to happen when that form is completed.

Next we have field labels. And this we see all the time these days on the web, where we’ve hidden the [00:01:00] form labels and we’re just using placeholders. The real problem with placeholders comes in once you have filled in the field, the label isn’t visible anymore. All right. And I actually just had this happen to me, um, in the last couple of weeks, I was filling in a form that had maybe a dozen or so fields, it used no labels, just placeholders, and I got interrupted.

Um, I had a package delivered, I had to walk away from the computer and come back, and I came back and looked at a form like this. that was filled in and I had to start over because I had no idea like what, you know, what questions I was answering. You know, the fields with my name and email were pretty obvious, but some of the other ones, I couldn’t even remember what the field was about.

And in fact, if you try to hide your labels in Gravity Forms, you’ll get a little warning message telling you that this can make things difficult. Um, so that affects, you know, A whole bunch of people, um, it [00:02:00] affected me and I would say that I don’t have a cognitive disability that would impact my memory or my ability to understand text.

But, for people who do have those issues, having no labels on a form makes it almost impossible to remember what you’re filling out and keeping track of what’s going on. So, make sure that your labels are always visible. and preferably display them above or before the form fields instead of under or after.

That helps to make it a little bit easier to associate the right label with the right form field.

And next, if you have a big list of things and you need people to select multiple choices from that list, one of your options is to use a multi select. And, Gravity Forms will warn you that you are using a multi select and it may not be the most user friendly option. Now, if you haven’t come across one of [00:03:00] these, because we don’t see them on the web all that often anymore, You have to hold down the control button and then click with your mouse to make multiple selections.

And if you hold down control and click three things, and then you see a fourth thing you want to click, but you forget to hold down the control button, it’ll unselect all the other things. So these fields are difficult for anybody to use. They are not very user friendly. But they are next to impossible to use for somebody who can’t use a mouse and might be using assistive technology to access your website.

So what you want to do instead is use a set of check boxes. These are very friendly to use. You don’t have to hold down any keyboard keys. You just check the boxes that you want. You can check as many or as few as you like. And to avoid a big long list, you can of course break that into columns so that it’s not taking up a big vertical chunk of your form.

And then finally, if we’re going to be contacting [00:04:00] people as a result of them filling out a form, if you’re going to be answering a question they’re submitting or they’re scheduling some kind of an appointment with you, instead of just using the same default contact method for everyone, if you have the ability to do so.

Ask people about their preferred contact method. Somebody who has a hearing impairment won’t be excited about getting a phone call from you. So they might prefer to have an email or an online chat instead. Other people might prefer to come in in person. They might prefer to have some kind of a video meeting online with Zoom or Microsoft Teams or something like that.

So if you have the capacity to offer different methods of contact. Then ask people what their preference is and how they might prefer to be contacted.

Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Natalie: So all of these things are just small adjustments, small changes that you can make on your website, but all these little adjustments add up. [00:05:00] They end up making a big difference at the end of the day to the people who come to your website and are trying to use it.

And I would encourage you to do something even if it doesn’t make it perfect. There is no such thing as a 100 percent perfectly accessible website. Just aim to make your website more accessible tomorrow than it is today. And finally, I would encourage you to ask for accessibility. If you are using a WordPress theme or a WordPress plugin and it has accessibility issues, reach out to the support team, reach out to the authors, and let them know that accessibility is important to you, and request that they take steps to make their product more accessible.

When we can help create demand for more accessible products, we’ll have lots more of accessible options. Thank you so much for having me today. It’s been wonderful to be here