Accessibility lessons: dealing with a large amount of form inputs
Accessibility lessons: dealing with a large amount of form inputs
Posted by:
Andy Sellick – Frontend Developer, GDS, Posted on: 8 April 2019
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Categories:
Accessibility, Code
On GOV.UK we’ve been looking at ways of improving our finder pages, like services and news and communications. Finder pages allow users to search for specific kinds of content using facets such as topic and organisations to narrow their results.
One of the facets uses a component called an ‘option select’ to display multiple checkboxes in an expandable box. This was built with accessibility in mind – it can be used with a keyboard, the expand/collapse functionality uses a button and the correct ARIA attributes are applied automatically. It looks like this:
Despite this, the component didn’t work well at scale. Some of the facets it was used for included hundreds of options, so navigating to the last checkbox using a keyboard or screen reader was a slow task.
This presented problems even when using a mouse or a mobile device, as navigating accurately through so many checkboxes became more difficult [...]