Back to: Gravity Forms Accessibility Checklist
Introduction to Gravity Forms Accessibility
Gravity Forms accessibility involves creating forms that work for diverse audiences, including people with mobility challenges, those who rely on keyboards or alternative input devices, and individuals who are blind, deaf, hard of hearing, or have cognitive disabilities. For resources, visit equalizedigital.com/gravity-forms-accessibility.
Understanding the Importance of Accessibility
Accessibility ensures that everyone, including individuals with disabilities, can interact with your web forms. Various laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508, and the European Accessibility Act, mandate compliance. This is particularly critical for nonprofits, especially those funded by federal or local governments or serving the public.
Accessible forms enable essential interactions like contacting organizations, requesting services, or making donations. These functions are vital for nonprofits to fulfill their missions and for developers creating websites for these organizations to deliver inclusive solutions.
Gravity Forms provides robust tools for creating accessible forms, but accessibility depends on user implementation. Today’s discussion focuses on steps to ensure your forms are truly accessible, leveraging Gravity Forms’ features while avoiding common pitfalls that could compromise accessibility.
Introduction to Gravity Forms Accessibility
Amber: Okay. So we’re going to be talking about Gravity Forms Accessibility.
Uh, I have a couple of icons on the screen here. I think something that is really important to note about accessibility is that we’re talking about, uh, a variety of different audiences. So that would be people who maybe have mobility challenges, don’t use a mouse, just use a keyboard, or they even use alternative input devices like switch devices, uh, people who are blind, people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Um, and there’s also cognitive disabilities, which I don’t have an icon for here, but um, it’s a variety of people and we’re going to be talking about how to make forms work well for all of these people. If you want to access the slides and other information, you can just go to equalizedigital. com slash gravity dash forms dash accessibility.
Understanding the Importance of Accessibility
Amber: So, if you aren’t familiar with accessibility, I always like to give a quick overview of why accessibility matters. Why is it important that everyone can submit your web forms? The [00:01:00] first thing that you should be aware is that laws around the world require websites to be accessible to people with disabilities.
Examples of these are the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508. In the United States, in Canada, there’s the Accessible Canada Act, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and Accessibility for Manitobans Act. In Europe, there’s the European Accessibility Act. And these are just a small handful of laws around the world that require accessibility.
Frequently, these do especially impact non profits, that are serving the public or nonprofits that receive dollars from the federal or their local government in order to support their initiatives or their grants. And so you really want to make sure that the forms, which are one of the most important parts of your website, can work for them and that the website as a whole is accessible for everyone with disabilities, to make sure that you are compliant [00:02:00] with these laws and with requirements for grants or other funding entities.
And really, if you think about it, as I mentioned, forms are one of the most important parts of the website. Everyone should be able to contact you, request your services, make a donation. All of those things are really important for you to actually live your mission as a non profit, or for your client, if you’re a developer who builds for non profits, to live their mission.
And so that’s really why accessibility matters. And what’s important to note about forms, um, I love Gravity Forms. It’s the form plugin that we use at our agency. I’ve been using it for a very long time, uh, and then Gravity Forms has done a lot to set up the tools to help you make accessible forms, but forms are only as accessible as you make them.
So what we’re gonna talk about today is some things that you can do when you are building forms to make sure that they are accessible, because even if you have a great accessible base in Gravity Forms, [00:03:00] if you make certain decisions, then the output might not actually be accessible. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.