Five mistakes teams make with accessible forms

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit accessible forms.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Every input needs a real label element
• Errors must be announced, not only coloured red
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Group related fields so the structure is clear. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

A reasonable first step

The short version

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.