http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/erik-brooks-i-am-sick-and-tired-of-hearing-about-8.5.1?opendocument&comments#anc1

Next: “For all you know 150,000 people might have tried to fill it in.”

Actually I do know. Given that the people who fill out this form have no place else to go to get a license in our jurisdiction, I seriously doubt they are going elsewhere over difficulties with a form.

What they will do is pick up the phone and call when they have ANY questions or encounter ANY difficulty. And they call a lot. But they never have questions or complaints about filling out this form. Our other application, yes, but not this one. And when the phone rings with website issues, it rolls downhill and I’m at the bottom

That stated, we’re always looking for ways to improve. And improving accessibility is what’s needed most.

Thanks for your feedback. I have made some changes as a result.

Thanks for the tip on the comments. Until now my current approach has worked OK. I guess I haven’t had someone ask 2 questions before I’ve had a chance to answer the 1st one. Keep it up though, it’s all very interesting. I’ll look into the comments thing.

Until then, I’ve messed about with the comment time in order to put it in the right order.

I agree that the examples you’ve given are better solutions to validation than “one dialog box at a time” if you have a standard form.

However my problem is that I don’t have a standard form. The form I’m enhancing for screen readers makes extensive use of progressive disclosure.

The point of using progressive disclosure is to keep from asking the user stupid questions. If they tell you they have no prior experience, it’s lame to ask them where they worked.

It works in a similar fashion for education and criminal history.

For example, if a user answers everything but “do/will you have the normal education required for this”, they’d only have one field that still needs answering at THAT MOMENT. But as soon as they answer “Yes”, they get 3 new questions. If they answer “No”, they get 1 new question.

About 30,000 people have successfully filled out this form in the past 6 years. But reconfiguring this for screen readers has been a challenge. I now have the screen reader advancing to the correct field based on their answer and that was really tough. But coming up with a decent validation scheme for a form utilizing progressive disclosure being filled out by users utilizing screen readers has been even more of a challenge.

Javascript alert boxes aren’t good for delivering validation messages on forms. The image below illustrates the issue. In order to proceed, the user must click OK. When they do so, the message disappears. So they need to remember the problem or re-submit the form to read the message again.”

If after clicking “ok”, focus is immediately moved to the field in error, the user will ‘usually’ be able to handle the problem. The key is not to make the user go searching for the field.

If your validation messages appear directly after a heading 1 for instance, a Jaws user can just navigate through the headings in order to get back there.

The other option is that they can tab through the remaining fields until they get to the next field that has a validation error.