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womble -> Accessibility and forms (5/6/2007 8:12:25)
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Views and input on the best way to make forms available requested....
I've got a site where I need to make a number of forms/surveys available to visitors. For the sake of space v. 'viewability' I'm wondering whether to make them on-screen (i.e. HTML forms) or downloadable (various options available) + if they're on screen they probably need to be downloadable as well. Some of them may be quite long and may be multi-paged, so, I've been thinking about my options in terms of the best way to make them available. Here's my evaluation so far - comments welcome....
HTML form
Pros: Fairly easy to make accessible and viewable on-screen
Cons: A PITA to code the long ones. Some will probably need to span multiple pages, so I'm gonna have to be faffing about with PHP variables and sessions and such like for the multi-page element. Adds quite a few more pages to the site. Can be made "downloadable" by printing but will need a print stylesheet to do that.
Word/RTF
Pros: Should be fairly accessible as long as the headings and such like are styled using the heading styles rather than just bolding paragraph text etc.
Cons: PITA to get boxes to line up right etc. Formatting likely to go crazy.
PDF
Pros: Easy to download. Users can't mess up the formatting.
Cons: Will need to be created from an original Word doc, which needs to be set up properly with headings etc. to make the pdf accessible. Not impossible to make accessible, but needs some work to ensure it is.
Excel spreadsheet
Pros: I've recently been using Excel spreadsheets to lay out forms in my "other" job because they're easy to email, and it's much easier to get response boxes etc. to play nice and line up
Cons: I'm not sure how screenreaders handle spreadsheets. My own (I use Dolphin's LunarPlus) is only a basic speech output app, and not a full-blown screen-reader, and tends to balk at anything that's not plain text and has columns and rows etc. I'm guessing from a semantics point of view that as we talk about tables on the web being for tabular data if we're wanting to be semantically correct, that using a spreadsheet for layout purposes rather than tabular data isn't really the semantic way to go.
At the moment I'm veering towards using Excel for the "downloadable" version for ease of visual layout, and using a HTML version, which will be accessible, on the site. Time and coding wise I think it's swings and roundabouts - what I gain from one method time wise, I lose from another. Either way I think on reflection I'm going to need an on-screen and downloadable version (unless someone's got any better ideas).
...which then leads on to the next question. (Bit off-topic here) If I'm using a HTML form, I then need a form processing script (I'll be using PHP). I can do a basic form script, but from a spam point of view it'd be wide open. For contact forms on sites I use Mike Cherim's lovely accessible and spam proof form, and I suppose if I did my own I could build in a couple of the ideas from Mike's script like the hidden field and simple question. Before I started using Mike's form, I had been using Weblingo's Dynaform script, which was very easy to implement and easily allowed required fields to be specified, but as I found out when one site it was on started getting badly hit by spam, ain't spam-proof. Suggestions for getting the damned forms to me once they've been completed also welcomed. [;)]
<edit>Just remembered I've got Forms To Go on my other computer, so I'll probably dig that out and have a play. I remember it makes setting up form validation a lot easier, but I can't remember how well it fared spam-wise</edit>
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