Chapter 10. Form Accessibility, Design, and Troubleshooting
The next time you visit your favorite web site, try reading the page using only the view source command in your web browser. Can you make sense of the information there, or do you have to pick through a forest of extraneous tags inserted by the site's designers for visual layout? Browsing page source is a rough approximation of how many users experience web pages when using a screen reader, assistive technology that helps compensate for physical limitations such as blindness. The practice and study of creating web content that doesn't shut out such readers is called accessibility. Accessibility matters, even for forms and web pages that don't have an expected audience of users with special visual or other needs. For example, even sighted persons are interested in eyes-free browsers, and making content accessible is closely related to improving usability. Designing an accessible web interface is often simply a matter of awareness of the many ways in which people use the Web (see http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/). Many devices are beginning to support speech interfaces, either alone or in combination with conventional visual interfaces. Other devices simply have limited processing capabilities, due to size or other constraints. No matter what the reason, keeping in mind principles of good design and accessibility is just good sense. Later, this chapter covers some common design patterns for forms, some XForms-specific tips and tricks, and some guidelines for transitional issues. |
