Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone By John M. Slatin,, Sharron Rush
Table of Contents
Chapter 10. Forms of Participation: Designing HTML Forms for Maximum Accessibility
In this chapter, we've worked through the process of redesigning the AIR judging form to provide better support for contest judges who have disabilities. We began by thinking through the features and the organization of the existing form and the challenges they posed not just for people with disabilities but for everyone. We then restructured the form, using the <fieldset> element to define top-level logical structures. Then we looked at different ways to handle the scoring, deciding on pull-down menus using <select> and <option> elements in favor of radio buttons. Finally, we added navigation links to allow judges to jump quickly to any item on the form.
The result is a form that works well with screen readers and talking browsers, but it isn't much to look at. We'll address these visual issues in Chapter 15 on Cascading Style Sheets. But we have a number of other issues to take care of first. In the next chapter, we'll take up the challenge of designing accessible tables, using bus schedules like the ones we discussed in Chapter 5 as our examples.
