Accessible Forms

"Compared to HTML, PDF forms have some inherent accessibility limitations. There is no real way to associate the visible text label with the form field, but there is a way to provide a text description that will be read to a screen reader while navigating through the PDF. In addition to the accessibility principles outlined in the previous page of this article, the following four steps are required to ensure the accessibility of a PDF form."

"Whether you are creating a form in HTML, PDF, Word or Excel, you need to ensure that they are accessible. Here is a great primer into techniques for creating accessible forms from WebAIM."

"At SurveyMonkey, we’ve built a survey tool that lets you create and send Section 508-compliant surveys. Section 508 is a federal law that says all electronic and information technology used by the federal government be accessible by people with disabilities. We want to make sure that any survey you create — even if it’s not used for the federal government — is accessible to everyone."

"Before looking into options like aria-required properties to identify mandatory form controls, authors should always consider using the HTML required attribute, which natively conveys the information about the mandatory state of a form control to all user agents and assistive technologies. While this approach will work great for users of screen readers, it has the distinct disadvantage of not displaying visual indications to sighted users, and as such, other methods should generally be […]

"Proposal for accessible error messages"

"508Surveys.com specializes in making the entire survey experience as easy and simple as possible for all audiences. Our web-based survey management software is easy to use, and 100% US Section 508, DDA and WAI AAA compliant and in our opinion, meets the WAI-AAA accessibility checklist for both taking AND CREATING surveys!"

"Form validation is the process of testing to ensure that end users enter necessary and properly formatted information into web forms. Error recovery is the process of guiding the user through fixing missing or improper information as detected by form validation. There are several methods of performing form validation and error recovery."

"There are times when the <label> element falls short—it cannot be used to provide multiple labels for a single form control, or to associate a single label with multiple form controls. There are also times when there is not a visible text label to be associated to a form control. The majority of these labeling limitations can be overcome with three ARIA properties (aria-labelledby, aria-describedby, and aria-label) and a couple other techniques outlined on this page."

"Forms are used for many types of interactions on the web. When we talk about the accessibility of forms, we are usually referring to their accessibility to people who use screen readers or keyboards. People with other types of disabilities are generally less affected by faulty forms. It should be noted, however, that everyone benefits from a well-organized, highly usable form, especially those with cognitive disabilities."

"Use the Outline button on the WAVE toolbar to see if the web page has a halfway decent, logical heading structure. I was pleased to see that each of the 130 sites used HTML headings, but several sites had heading creep. Screen reader users benefit tremendously from good heading structure, but if a web page has too many headings, this offsets the benefits, and some of these sites have several dozen headings. If everything is a heading, nothing is a heading."