A Guide To Accessible Form Validation — Smashing Magazine

When it comes to form validation, we can explore it from two perspectives: usability and accessibility. “What’s the difference between usability and accessibility?” you may ask. Let’s start from there.

Usability

Usability is about improving a given action until it’s as easy and delightful as possible. For example, making the process of fixing an invalid field easier or writing better descriptions so the user can fill the field without facing an error message.

To get a really good grasp of the challenges in this process, I highly recommend you to read the deep-dive “Designing better inline validations UX” from Vitaly. There, you’ll learn about the different approaches to validate a field and what are the caveats and trade-offs of each one.

Accessibility

Choosing the best UX approach is just half of the challenge. The other half is ensuring that any person knows the field is invalid and easily understands how to fix it. That’s what I’ll explore through this guide.

You can look at ‘Accessibility’ and ‘Usability’ as two equally important universes with their own responsibilities. Accessibility is about ensuring anyone can access the content. Usability is about how easy it is to use the website. Once overlapped will take ‘User Experience’ to its...