FORM ACCESSIBILITY TIPS

For people with disabilities, forms often mean extra friction.

The world’s leading brands spend a lot of time figuring out how to reduce friction on their forms — and get more people to complete them.

But for people with disabilities, missing or vague field labels can make filling out forms an unpleasant guessing game. Without clear, descriptive labels (that are also announced to screen reader users), it can be hard for people with visual or cognitive impairments to know what information to enter in each field.

After scanning almost 2 million forms, we found that nearly 25% are inaccessible to people with disabilities — which can prevent them from making purchases, signing up for accounts, or requesting support.

Example of an inaccessible form field:
Example of an accessible form field:

1 in 4 forms are missing clear labels and instructions for people with disabilities.

Missing or non-descriptive form field labels is one of the most common accessibility issues. Of the roughly 2 million forms we scanned, nearly 25% failed to provide descriptive labels for their form fields.

1 broken form and 3 forms with labels like Name and Email to represent 1 in 4 forms that are missing clear labels.

Keyboard traps can prevent people from taking the next step with your business.

Keyboard accessibility is another common accessibility issue for most organizations — and it affects not just general site navigation, but also key actions like filling out forms.

Keyboard-only users should be able to tab between elements on a page (or form) without getting “trapped,” i.e., being unable to move forward or backwards.

However, 81% of domains tested had at least one page with keyboard functionality issues — and 56% of pages had at least one issue.

56% of pages scanned had at least 1 keyboard trap

Keyboard accessibility issues can prevent people with visual and motor impairments from jumping between sections of a page, clicking a link, or filling out a form.

BEST PRACTICES

Form accessibility tips

Websites today often use color to communicate different statuses (think red to indicate an error or missing field, or green to indicate success). Although these color-based cues are useful for many people, they can also present challenges for the 300 million people globally who have some form of color vision deficiency.

If you use color to indicate missing or required information, be sure to combine it with another element (such as an error message or symbol) to make sure that people who struggle to perceive color are not left behind.

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