An accessible form is one that a wide range of people can use, including those who may have disabilities that affect how they are able to interact with the form on the computer screen. For example, the form user may have a visual impairment or reduced mobility.
Mobile form uses ARIA html5 accessibility standard to support a number of features and capabilities that enhance the usability of forms for users with a range of disabilities, and assist form authors and create forms that are more accessible to people with disabilities.
When you design forms for a wide audience, you should consider that some users may have disabilities that affect how they interact with the form. Some users may have vision impairment, reduced mobility, or other disabilities. To accommodate the needs of all users, you may find it worthwhile to include certain practical design features in your forms and to test forms using various assistive technologies.
Setting a meaningful tabbing order is very important when designing forms that are accessible to users with vision impairment or users with disabilities. These users typically do not use a mouse to navigate through a form, so they depend on the keyboard. A logical tabbing order sequence ensures that they have full access to all the fields on the form and that they can navigate the form in a way that is sensible and efficient. Screen readers and other assistive technology also make use of the tabbing order.
In order to access spoken information about a form, users with vision impairment need to use a screen reader. Screen readers speak information about where the cursor is located on the form. As the form author, you must specify the text for the screen reader to read.
To provide an accessible form, you need to understand how screen readers work. You also need to know how to use the Designer Accessibility palette to specify information that the screen reader will speak for the objects on forms. Keep in mind these considerations related to implementing accessible forms that can support screen readers:
- Establish a logical tabbing order that includes all fields and buttons. Setting the tabbing order is important because screen reader tags are ordered top-to-bottom, left-to-right. The screen reader will generally read through an entire page, including any boilerplate objects. When the user begins to tab through the form, the screen reader reads text for each field as it becomes active.
- Announce the names of buttons and fields, as well as their purpose.
- Users cannot tab into protected fields. Calculation fields, such as a field that totals values entered in other fields, are an example of a protected field. For the screen reader to read the value of a protected field, you can place an empty Read Only field either on top of or next to the protected field to speak the value of the protected field.
LiveCycle ES Designer includes a number of options that support screen readers. For each object in a form, you can specify one of several settings for the screen reader text:
- Custom screen reader text, which you set in the Accessibility palette.
- Tooltips for objects on the finished form, which you set in the Accessibility palette.
- Captions for fields on the form.
- Names of objects, as specified in the Name option of the Binding tab.
Only one setting is spoken for a single object. The screen reader searches for the presence of these settings to determine what is spoken. The default search order is Custom Text, Tooltip, Caption, and Name. When the screen reader finds one of these options, it speaks that text. You can override this default order using the Screen Reader Precedence option in the Accessibility palette.