A practical checklist for accessible forms

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Run through this the next time accessible forms comes up.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Every input needs a real label element
• Errors must be announced, not only coloured red
• Group related fields so the structure is clear
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

Every input needs a real label element. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about accessible forms before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every input needs a real label element — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.