What to ask your agency about accessible forms

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on accessible forms, these questions are worth asking early.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Every input needs a real label element. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Group related fields so the structure is clear. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The short version

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
• Group related fields so the structure is clear — 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.