Accessible forms for small teams

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Most advice about accessible forms assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

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.

What to keep

Every input needs a real label element. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

Where to start

Group related fields so the structure is clear. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.