Universal Design and Paperwork, vol.1
In the accessible future, robots do my taxes and pay my bills. Today, I select all photos with cars.
This issue starts a short series that will cover the topic of paperwork and accessibility: what makes for accessible digital forms, how to design accessible documents, and why it all matters at all.
This issue is 866 words long and will take about 4 minutes to read. Let’s dive right into it.
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Do robots hate paperwork, too?
In my previous articles, I talked about the challenges of living with ADHD, and forms were listed among my greatest fears. I went as far as to compile a list of requirements, designed to help put accessible forms together.
Yet, the world around me seems to be fine with the abundance of forms, naturally gravitating towards structure and predictability, which forces me to look for ways to avoid the torture.
I personally find solace in Bitwarden, an open-source password manager that guards my login details and identities. Whenever I stumble upon yet another website asking for my personal information, I ask Bitwarden to autocomplete the form for me. Sometimes, it even works.
On most of the websites, however, the forms appear to be so broken that my information ends up all over the place: phone number in the website field, email in the street address, website as a city, and so on.
I cannot help but imagine if the machine (let’s call it an “AI-assistant” or simply “AI”) didn’t have me to check and validate its input. If instead, AI claimed that it would automate everything, and ended up with a similar, if not a tremendously worse, result.
Let’s say, it was submitting a credit card application, making or purchase, or planning a beach holiday. What are the odds that I would then find myself stranded on a frozen lake with a letter of rejection from a bank and the wetsuit of my dream shipped to someone else’s house?
I won’t blame the robot. My rage would be rightfully directed at those who forgot to label the fields in their forms properly.
I completed it my way
This page on the W3 School website describes the autocomplete attribute: an HTML-attribute that communicates the meaning of the field to the browser (and its extension). Even those seeing HTML for the first time will be able to understand the following code that uses the autocomplete attribute:
<input id="email" autocomplete="email" name="email" aria-required="true" placeholder="Email" required>Unsurprisingly, WCAG also mentions autocomplete in the rule to test 1.3.5 success criterion (Identify Input Purpose): although the attribute itself is not a requirement, it serves an important role in making forms easier to fill.
People with language and memory related disabilities or disabilities that affects executive function and decision-making benefit from the browser auto-filling personal information
Machines, unsurprisingly, also require instructions to function. Autocomplete communicates the requirements to the machine. Its absence forces the robot to play detective and guess what each field is expected to receive: a country code, for instance, sends a rather clear message.
Should the task get too complicated, however, the machine either yields (as an old-school autocomplete would) or makes things up.
But soon, AI will…
The prophesised future that tech bros will not stop talking about is expected to bring, among other things, unprecedented levels of automation. Smart machines doing human jobs and replacing their meat bag overlords at just about anything is a sweet dream indeed.
I may come off as overly zealous in my claim that accessibility cannot be fully automated, but from where I stand, we are still light years away from being able to delegate our important tasks to robots.
Without concrete directions, provided by humans, machines grow lost, confused, and defensive. Today, they only risk getting a pizza recipe terribly wrong, but what if money and reputation were at stake?
I look back at every website that tortured me with its endless form fields and incomprehensible error messages: job application platforms, travel website, government agencies, you name it.
In many ways, every interaction with the form is a conversation with the website owner, an introduction, a request, a dialogue, with one side often growing constantly impatient, and the other being overly demanding, strict, and unwelcoming.
It is a necessary interaction that requires precision for a satisfactory outcome. Detailed instructions do not guarantee it, but make it at the very least achievable.
People with dyslexia, ADHD, users of screen readers and other assistive tech will benefit greatly from automation, especially when it comes to completing routine and time-consuming tasks. Unfortunately, this automation will not come as a result of a divine intervention.
Accessible paperwork is created by people for people.
To be continued…
In the next issues, we will talk about accessible digital documents and universal design for paperwork in real life. Stay tuned!