Table of Content:
- What is 'Accessibility'?
- Setting Up
- A Simple Form
- Forms that use tables for layout
- Tabindex
- Adding tabindex when adding a new form field
- Adding tabindex to existing form fields
- Access Key
- Validating for Accessibility
- Conclusion.
Forms and Accessibility
Whether you are a web designer or primarily a back-end developer, you are likely to need to create forms for your web sites and applications - whether they are simple contact forms or complex survey systems making the forms easy to use and accessible to users whatever devices they are using will ensure that people can complete the forms and therefore increase the likelihood of visitors actually doing so.
Making our applications is important, not only because enabling all users to get the most out of the web should be seen as the right and ethical thing to do but because in many cases we are required by law to do so. Section 508 in the USA means that sites run by federal agencies must comply to the accessibility legislation laid out in this law, other countries are developing their own laws and there are even independent test cases being taken against owners of inaccessible sites.
Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.
Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.
As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272
Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.
In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.