Forms with feeling, accessibility, and inclusion

As a government agency, it is important that our forms are friendly, accessible, inclusive, and empathetic. We serve residents of all backgrounds, so should our forms.

Be considerate of residents’ time

Keep your forms short and simple. Remember, residents have jobs, families, busy schedules. We want to avoid making a resident complete a 15-page long application with over 200 fields.

• Always try to reduce the amount of fields in your form.

• Remove fields which collect information that can be:

  • gathered a different way

  • gathered later at a more convenient time for the resident

  • omitted altogether

Be accessible

• Use simple, plain language in your forms to make sure they are accessible to all users, including those with cognitive disabilities and lower literacy.

• Make sure your entire form can be used and completed using the tab key. Some users with disabilities use screen reading software that uses the tab function to move to different elements online.

• Users with lower digital literacy can struggle with accessing information with certain technology and tools. Design your forms to flow in an intuitive, organized way that is easy to comprehend.

• When showing error or success messages, don’t solely rely on changing the field color, as this may not help users with colorblindness. Be sure to also use text and icons to communicate the message.

• Keep an eye on your forms’ performance. Some residents may be on a pay-as-you-go data plan. If your form is a slow-loading, large PDF or even a long digital form, you may be making it inaccessible to those residents.

• Do not use gifs or other flashing elements on your form as this can induce seizures in some users.

• Avoid setting forms to a time limit. Allow users to complete the form at their pace.

  • Forms can be challenging to use, especially those with visual or cognitive disabilities.

See more on the Web Accessibility Initiative's Form Concepts Guide.

Be considerate of gender, race, and ethnicity

• If you want to list gender, title, address, email, and phone as fields in a form, ask yourself: do you really need to know?

  • If yes, explain in the form why you need this information. This can make residents feel more comfortable with sharing it.

• Make gender, race, and ethnicity fields optional as often as possible.

• Be thoughtful in phrases and terms you use to categorize race and gender. See how the Census Bureau is changing its approach.

• Avoid asking for titles (Ms., Mrs. Mr., etc.). If necessary, make that field free-form response.

• When asking for gender, consider using pronouns instead.

Image source: Free-form, optional gender pronoun field on Vox Media job application

Be warm

Keep your form language friendly, warm, and conversational. We want residents to feel welcome and feel like their form request will go to a person, not a black hole. See the Digital Style Guide for more on tone and voice for the City.

Keep in mind the context

Always keep the resident’s experience in mind when creating forms.

• Who is the resident completing this form? Why?

• Where will they come across this form and at what point does it fall in their process of accessing the service?

• What type of service are they accessing with this form?

• What happens in the process after they fill out the form? Does the form need to inform what’s coming ahead?

• What kind of emotional or mind state will they be in when they have to complete this form?

For example, what if a resident needs to fill out a form to order a death certificate for a loved one that recently passed away?

You would want to make that form simple. The resident is likely stressed, and we don’t want to add to that with a poorly-structured form.