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womble
Posts: 5461
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
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Accessibility and forms - 5/6/2007 8:12:25
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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Nicole
Posts: 2800
Joined: 9/15/2004
From: Nambucca / Kempsey, Australia
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RE: Accessibility and forms - 5/6/2007 8:51:25
Womble,
The vast majority of your post is above my head but I will be interested in any responses.
Forms to Go has been updated lately and include 4 different ways to spam-proof the form, captcha, stop words, IP addresses and HTTP referrer.
I've not tried any of these yet but need to shortly as the existing form on my site is being hit by spam more often now but from what I read within the somewhat pathetic FTG information files, I'm being hit as the form owner whereas no spam is "supposedly" being sent from my form to others.
Of course I can't really confirm this and don't know how I can test it.
I've never created a form that spans more than one page before, i don't envy you right now, but I don't quite understand why a properly formatted PDF created from word would be too much of a pain (pain as in all forms are painful anyway) - again I don't really know about this.
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womble
Posts: 5461
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
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RE: Accessibility and forms - 5/6/2007 9:55:52
Hmmm, I'll have to take another look at FTG Nicole. It's been a fair while since I used it as most of the stuff I've done recently has had just a basic contact form, so I've been using Mike's vision of loveliness.
quote:
A fully interactive form they complete online and submit.
I'd use Mike's form as a baseline and add extra fields into it. You know it's secure.
Duh!  I really would be dangerous if I had a brain! I do seem to remember looking it a while ago and thinking, "shouldn't be too hard to add extra fields into that", and then as forms are not my most favourite aspect of web design, went off and did something else and forgot about it.
The divs with borders sounds like it's probably the best way to go for a static version for printing (one of the forms I'm doing is actually for the same purpose as your example - the others...*sigh*...it makes my head hurt just trying to figure out where to start with them as I can see they're gonna be multi-page monstrosities... ).
Excel - I suspected as much, but thought I'd mention it anyway (got me out of a hole in my "other" job - produce 2 forms by the end of today and they need to look pretty as well  ), but that's for a very specific form and the data that comes back in Excel form is easy to add to the rest of the data collected.
Hmmmm, off to ferret about now in some PHP now. Just been having a look at Mike's script, and adding in fields is straightforward. Doing it multi-page would be a PITA, but for now I think I can get away with just a one-pager.
Btw Nicole, on the subject of spam, see if your host has MailFoundry available. The main host I use has just started using it (they had been using Spam Assassin before but I didn't get on with that), and it's completely stopped spam landing in my inbox on the accounts that are on domains with that host. They do a hosted service (though it's a minimum of 10 mailboxes) which might be worth looking into if you're using multiple email addresses and if you're finding spam's a real problem to you.
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ed1
Posts: 135
From: Annandale, VA USA
Status: offline
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RE: Accessibility and forms - 5/14/2007 9:18:44
Accessibility and forms
Some things to consider: Review 508 http://www.section508.gov/
and w3c guidelines. http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Accessibility Options: MSWord and MSExcell can not be made fully accessible. I haven’t tried 2003 versions of these products, but they probably fail as well. PDF is good because it has readers for all platforms, but PDF is also weak when it comes to accessibility. HTML is the best bet for accessibility in forms. I check pages with AccVerify http://www.hisoftware.com/access/accds2ibtro.html .
Forms are tricky because you can be overly cautious and end up being so redundant for field identifiers it’s actually worse from a reader to interpret.
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ed1
Posts: 135
From: Annandale, VA USA
Status: offline
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RE: Accessibility and forms - 5/15/2007 8:26:24
quote:
teaching your Granny to suck eggs where Womble is concerned
Why would Granny wish to suck eggs? Or even Womble? This topic needs to be investigated in another thread. On the other hand, has anyone tried a product called CommonLook? It’s from NetCentric http://www.commonlook.com/products/standards.aspx
And supposed to make .PDF more accessible. I haven’t tried it myself.
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Tailslide
Posts: 5915
Joined: 5/10/2005
From: Out here on the raggedy edge
Status: offline
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RE: Accessibility and forms - 5/15/2007 9:55:33
The problem with that link is that they charge you for checking/fixing PDFs when if you've got a PDF editor (for instance if you created the PDF in the first place) then all you have to do is arrange the document properly (such as using heading format for headings) and then save it as a tagged PDF and you're done!
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