Accessible Form Problems and Solutions

In the previous design and accessibility article, Linda illustrated various changes that she made to the Montrose Citizens for Responsible Growth test site to date. The alterations included changes to global structure within the WordPress PHP files and in the accompanying CSS file. In this article, Linda addresses the W3C’s accessibility guidelines for forms and how these guidelines work in some cases and are unnecessary in others. The solutions included in this article provide a means for developers to use dynamic scripts (like PHP and ASP) to make their sites more accessible. She also provides some back-up solutions for developers who want to stick with client-side applications which incorporate programs like AJAX.

Minimal Form Accessibility: W3C Standards and Inherent Problems

The minimal accessibility standards set for any Website HTML forms come from the granddaddy of all Web accessibility standards – the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In their instructions on how to create accessible forms, the W3C discusses six HTML form issues. I adjusted the order of the six directives so that they make more sense (at least to me!). Also please notice that the W3C examples were written for HTML documents only, and the first tip-off to this limitation is indicated by the use of capital letters in the tags. XHTML construction is formulated with all lower-case letters, and the W3C has addressed XHTML/DTD forms in their XHTML forms modules. However, I’ve also included some examples of how to modify the codes below to fit XHTML formats in this article.