Universal Design for Web Applications

Chapter 5. Forms

Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.

—Postel’s Law, from RFC 793, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification

If the most important feature of the Web is the link, the form is a close second. It goes without saying that forms are integral to the web experience. And yet, so often such little attention is paid to how we use them. Anyone who’s used the Web for any period of time has likely experienced frustrating cryptic error messages, random failures, or worst of all, lost data.

While researching for this book, Matt encountered a survey site that inexplicably didn’t use HTML checkbox or radio button controls to collect results from users. In their place were images that changed when clicked and didn’t completely behave like HTML controls, making it extremely frustrating to work through. Imagine a company asking you to fill out a 50-question survey (a big enough inconvenience on its own) and finding that you couldn’t tab from field to field and hit the space bar to check or uncheck items. Worse still, imagine you get to the bottom of the page, click on the image reading “Submit”, and nothing happens. Now imagine your impression of the company that put you through all that, as you retrieve the laptop you just threw across the room.

These days, the stakes are higher than ever. E-commerce sites need simple checkout procedures that make their customers feel satisfied with their experience—and confident enough ...