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Building accessible forms

Charlotte Hirst

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Who am I?

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Why should I care?

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When you know your user group is everyone it gives you a whole new way of looking at things and you become slightly obsessed with usability and accessibility.

I do feel like a broken record sometimes, my reaction to most things is “thats not accessible”

Not only does the census have to work for everyone but when you look at the different types of questions it requires such a breadth of testing

The questions cover the protected characteristics, languages, different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, people in armed forces …. The list goes on and then you have to look at the other side of different age groups, levels of education, technical abilities, assistive technologies, devices …

Since September 2018, every public sector is required to ensure their website or app is accessible. Its imperative that you can reach your users to ensure you have done everything you can

At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability. Many more have a temporary disability. Its important to bear in mind the entirety of your service, internal and external facing aspects.

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Mutually exclusive pattern

Mutually exclusive - we had a number of questions that required options to be mutually exclusive, GDS didnt have a pattern at the time and we had always just accepted the data regardless. We researched to understand what behaviour people expected.

Unanimously people wanted the system to not allow them to make a mistake in the first place. People dont like to get an error, make people anxious. We use Google Analytics to monitor users behaviour and then work to remove problems. We observed 25% of users getting an error on a whole number, they wanted to be precise and give decimals. Processing couldnt handle it so we rounded accordingly, we dealt with complexity and although we didnt want data, we allowed it for user.

Designing the pattern was the easy bit, making this simple pattern accessible was not easy

Structure of page, meant a screen reader would read question and then ‘Or”. If you had selected ‘Ireland’ and ‘other’, you then selected ‘none’, the first two options would be deselected. Someone using a screenreader has no idea that just happened so the screen reader needs to tell them whats just happened. This took a lot of iterations to get it working
Issue with on certain screen readers after each response option it would read ‘or’.

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Lookups pattern

Lookups are the most troublesome user interface we have encountered.

Why use:

Easier for user to select an option - e.g if you are unsure like activity of a company
Improves data quality
Reduces processing cost of manually entered strings

Issues

Iteration 1 - caused massive problems, people thought they had to choose from list. This can lead to people being frustrated, especially if the question is about identity or job title. People selecting any random one, because they just want to get through it or literally not able to move forward. Cant have that in a statistical org
Iteration 2 - is the new design (which we stole idea from BBC) to split out the options and emphasise subtly that they are suggestions you can still type in your own if needed. Working a lot better
People with lower digital skills have real problems using lookups, in many instances they are not even seeing the suggestions being presented as they are looking at keyboard not a screen

This can lead to either them just typing it in and continue to next screen, which is fine
Or it can lead to them noticing and then being so confused what do

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Address lookups

pattern

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I used to think that the important thing to remember with content is to keep it simple and use plain English.

Dont get me wrong its very important, I have come to realise there is so much more to it than that.

Things to remember

What font are using? Shape of the letters can have a huge impact on people being able to read it and software being able to interpret it.
Left align your content, testing with people with Dyslexia, it was fascinating to be told they can see patterns emerging “like a river” if the content is centrally aligned.
Content needs to be the point, no one wants to read a lot of information, some people couldn't comprehend that much information, if you are listening to a screen reader read it all out, you are unlikely to remember what has just been said. Chatter on a screen reader
Response options, research has shown in form design that the optimum number is 4 +/- 2 options for people's cognition
Test the cognition of your content, dont add highlighting or bold because you think someone needs it, everything should be based on user needs
Only add content based on user needs, we stripped all guidance from census and only added it or definitions based on user need

Deaf community is a user group we have struggled to understand their user needs but we are starting to get some good contacts and from speaking to a couple of people, we have been told ‘language’ is going to be main problem.

11 million people in the UK are deaf or hard of hearing. There are 151,000 BSL users in the UK. Deaf people are more likely to: have poor mental health - up to 50%, compared to 25% for the general population

I had no idea the issue faced by many deaf people, English language can be quite different, for instance there is no past, present or future tense.

We are looking to introduce a BSL video on every question page

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Do you always use a GDS pattern?

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How does someone access your service? Every household will receive a letter with a unique code so they can access and complete it, how does a blind person or someone with a visual impairment read the letter?

A lot of people will then have to wait for someone to read the letter for them.

I visited a young persons home where he would scan his letters with software on his phone, which would read it back to him. However the structure of our letter didnt lend itself so read things out of order. The font meant the census was read as 2027 not 2021. The code was 16 characters and was too long for the user to record it or remember it, when the software was reading it. Therefore he needed to wait for someone to come round to help put the code in but then was able to complete the census with no problem. I found it heartbreaking to watch someone struggle with something you have put in front of them, especially where you feel like you have stripped that persons independence. Perfectly able to complete the survey but couldn’t access it.

Its important to remember every step in your entire user journey -including any non digital aspects and how your users can contact you. E.g dont just give a phone num - spoke to people with anxiety and would never dream of calling someone they didnt know.

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Survey progress iteration 1

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Survey progress iteration 2

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Survey progress iteration 3

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Survey progress iteration 4

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Survey progres

Iteration 4

Survey progress iteration 5

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Survey progres

Iteration 4

Survey progress iteration 6

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Survey progress iteration 3 (final)

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Survey progres

Iteration 4

Don’t be afraid to throw it away and start again

People will always surprise you

Testing I have been part of over the last year has given me a glimpse into peoples lives and how technology has truely changed their lives and that we have a part to play in it.

I cannot urge you enough to get out there and observe user research of people using your service. I have had the pleasure of meeting so many people and every time it just makes me want to do more. It can be an emotional experience watching someone who can be completely dependent on a carer for every aspect of their lives but technology can give them independence.

Remember its not all about physical limitations, there are people out there who are young carers, maybe children who are the only English speakers in their household, get out there and meet people and understand peoples situations and how you can hopefully make their lives easier.

Things that might be of interest

“I, Daniel Blake” BBC documentary well worth a watch - whole new perspective

Design system used to build our features

https://ons-design-system.netlify.com/

Interesting GDS blog around personas

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2019/02/11/using-persona-profiles-to-test-accessibility/

Funkify – viewing your site through the eyes of users with different abilities and disabilities

https://www.funkify.org/?v=79cba1185463

Our code base

Service - https://github.com/ONSdigital

Electronic questionnaire - https://github.com/ONSdigital/eq-survey-runner

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Questions

Charlotte.hirst@ons.gov.uk