Forms and Accessibility

Forms are a critical part of many web sites — they provide a lot of the functionality that makes the Web a much more interesting, engaging way to connect with users than simple documents.  However, badly designed forms can cause problems for users.

Form creation in a Content Management System is usually handled in a way that makes it difficult to create accessibility problems, primarily involving labels for form fields.

Labels

A form, in a general sense, is made up of input areas — text areas, radio buttons, dropdown selectors, and so on.  In general, unless you’re doing higher-end creative coding, you’re probably not disabling any of the build-in accessibility features of these tools.

The problem you might be creating, though, is when you create labels for your form fields.  The Label tag is usually created by your CMS based on the information you add when you create the form field, so in most cases you won’t have to worry about this very much at all, as long as you’re using your CMS carefully.

However, we often will add HTML that is not associated with a form field to the page that happens to also work as a label. That text may move around or be presented differently by a screen reader — in a way that breaks any visual association with a specific field that you intended.  So, please make sure that you’re creating sensible, usable labels as you create your forms.