Webinar: Optimizing Your Online Forms for Accessibility

How to analyse your forms to improve their accessibility

We partner with Amrdeep Athwal from Conversions Matter to bring you a video session about form accessibility. By watching the video you will learn things to look out for on your form that may be causing issues for users. You'll also get to understand the different types of disabilities you need to accommodate and how you might do that.

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In the video we cover:

• Why are forms not accessible?
• What types of disability do you need to account for?
• How many people have issues that might affect accessibility?
• How could this impact your business?
• What can we do to optimize for accessibility?

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As a bonus, here are some tools that can help make your forms and website more accessible:

• WAVE
• AChecker
• Tenon.io
• colourcontrast.cc
• Contrast Checker
• Fontanello

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Webinar Transcript: Optimising Web Forms for Accessibility

Alun Lucas (Zuko):
Okay, so let’s kick off. Hello and welcome everyone to another one of Zuko’s webinars.

Today we’re going to be looking at optimising your web forms for accessibility, with our special guest Amrdeep Athwal, who’s the Director of Optimisation at Conversion Matters. He’s been optimising for a long time, and I’ll leave him to introduce himself when I hand over.

I’m Alun Lucas, Managing Director of Zuko Analytics. If you’ve not heard of Zuko, we’re a form analytics platform designed to show you when, where, and why users drop out of your forms, so you can improve them and ultimately increase your throughput of new customers.

Housekeeping

We’ll keep this fairly informal, so feel free to drop any questions in the Q&A or chat as we go through, and we’ll try to pick those up at an appropriate time.

We’ll also make the recording available to all of you — we’ll email you afterwards — so there’s no need to take too many notes.

Without further ado, I’ll hand over to Amrdeep. There’s been a little technical issue getting him on screen, so you might not be able to see his face unfortunately, but you will be able to hear him.

Over to you, Amrdeep.

Introduction

Amrdeep Athwal:
Thanks a lot, Alun. Glad to be here.

As Alun said, I’m an optimisation and analytics consultant. I’ve been working with data since 2007, and doing optimisation since 2012. Over the last few years I’ve had a strong focus on accessibility and accessibility optimisation.

Let me share my screen and then we can kick off.

Why Are Websites Still Not Accessible?

One of the main questions I always ask myself is: why are websites and digital platforms not accessible?

There are lots of reasons depending on the companies involved, but a lot of it comes down to the same thing I see with web analytics — accessibility is often treated as an afterthought. It gets considered late in development, when there isn’t much time or resource to make meaningful changes.

There’s also often a lack of understanding about the challenges people can face when accessing digital content.

Different Types of Accessibility Needs

Hearing-related accessibility

One common issue is hearing-related accessibility. This could include partial or complete hearing loss, but also conditions like tinnitus.

Even if forms don’t always involve audio, many sites use video content or audio prompts. It’s important to remember that improving accessibility for someone with hearing challenges also helps people who may be in a temporary situation — like being on a noisy bus or in a loud environment.

Some forms even include audio capture, so it’s still relevant.

Cognitive and neurological accessibility

Another area that gets overlooked is cognitive or neurological accessibility. Users may be neurodivergent or have cognitive differences that affect how they process information.

They may not follow the “standard” user journey in the way designers expect, so forms need to be clear and forgiving. This includes allowing users to complete fields in different orders and avoiding patterns that create confusion.

A great example is premature validation warnings — constantly telling someone they’ve done something wrong before they’ve even finished typing can be a major hindrance.

Alun Lucas (Zuko):
That’s an interesting point. When I think of accessibility, I tend to think of visual or physical needs first, but cognitive accessibility makes error messaging even more important. That’s something I hadn’t really considered.

Amrdeep Athwal:
Exactly. I recently had an experience where a password form told me I needed a special character. I used a dollar sign, which I always consider a special character — but the system didn’t accept it.

It took me about ten minutes to work out that the site didn’t count the dollar sign as “special.” If there are exceptions like that, you need to clearly explain them, otherwise users will keep trying the same thing and getting frustrated.

The point is: accessibility improvements usually help everyone, not just users with disabilities.

Physical accessibility

Physical accessibility is often the most familiar area. It becomes even more important on mobile because screen sizes are smaller.

For example, my father is in his 60s and holds his phone at arm’s length. Try tapping a small call-to-action like that — it’s hard. If buttons or form fields are too close together, users can easily mis-tap.

However, changes should always be tested. I once ran a test where I increased spacing between form fields on mobile for a form aimed at an older audience. I expected conversion to increase, but conversions dropped by around 15%.

The reason was perception: users were scrolling to the bottom of the form to check how long it was, and the extra spacing made the form look longer. It felt more effort, even though it wasn’t.

The solution was to split the form into two steps. That worked much better.

Speech-related accessibility

Some users may struggle with speech, or may use speech-to-text tools. Speech recognition isn’t perfect, so forms need to allow for imperfect input and guide users toward correcting mistakes.

In industries where accuracy matters — like financial services or healthcare — a summary screen at the end of the form can be useful. It lets users confirm the details before submitting.

Visual accessibility

One of the biggest issues is how screen readers interact with poorly structured pages.

A common example is placing form labels beside or below input fields. The most effective layout is usually putting labels above the field, because it allows users to understand what’s required before moving into the input.

It’s also good practice to include a clear heading for a form so users immediately know what it’s for — especially if they arrive there directly or use assistive tools.

Another major issue is contrast. Text needs to be legible against backgrounds. Even if someone doesn’t have vision impairment, trying to read a low-contrast form on a bright sunny day can be nearly impossible.

Again: accessibility improvements benefit everyone.

How Many People Does This Affect?

The scale of accessibility needs is bigger than most people realise.

Disability affects roughly 15–20% of the world’s population, depending on definitions and research.

That’s around one in seven to one in five people, which is a significant portion of any audience.

Other key figures include:

• Around one in six people have hearing loss
• Around 30% of people with disabilities have dexterity issues
• Around 5 million people struggle with reading in the UK
• Around 2 million people in the UK suffer from complete sight loss

Many of these users rely on screen readers, so your site and form structure needs to be clear and correctly tagged.

Why Should Businesses Care?

Apart from the obvious reason — being a decent human being — there are strong commercial reasons too.

The “purple pound” (spending power of people with disabilities) is worth around £249 billion per year in the UK.

Research also suggests that people who find a site that meets their accessibility needs are much more likely to stay loyal to that brand, increasing customer lifetime value.

Another important point: around one in four disabled adults have never been online, meaning your site could be someone’s first experience of the web. That makes clarity and simplicity even more important.

The reality is also bleak:

• Around 70% of UK websites are inaccessible
• A WebAIM report found 98% of the top 1 million websites had detectable WCAG failures

Accessibility and Legal Risk (US)

In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to many websites. If you sell or do business in the US, accessibility can be a legal requirement.

A company I worked with was sued twice in two years and lost both times, due to accessibility issues (in their case related to colour blindness).

Accessibility lawsuits are increasing year on year. Even if you ignore the ethical reasons, avoiding legal risk is a major motivator.

Q&A Discussion

Tools for checking accessibility

Amrdeep Athwal:
There are automated tools you can use — such as Wave checkers — that can highlight things like missing alt text or contrast issues.

However, the best approach is often working with specialist accessibility companies, who put your site in front of real users with accessibility needs and conduct an audit.

Convincing management to improve internal accessibility

If your internal apps or intranets aren’t accessible, that could expose the business to HR and legal issues.

A good approach is to involve HR and frame it as an employee experience issue and a legal compliance risk. You don’t want employees unable to access payslips or internal tools because the system wasn’t designed accessibly.

Can analytics reveal accessibility issues?

Accessibility is difficult to detect directly in analytics, but you can infer problems through behaviour.

Some signals include:

• Increased time taken to complete forms
• Drop-off points in form sections
• Abandonment after validation errors
• Feedback widget comments (often very valuable)

Testing can also help identify issues — for example increasing font size and seeing whether conversion improves.

The hardest part of accessibility

Amrdeep Athwal:
The hardest thing is catering for all needs.

Sometimes accessibility improvements help one group but negatively impact another. For example, some neurodivergent users may struggle with white text on a black background, while others prefer it.

You often need to make decisions based on your audience and balance the trade-offs.

Key Takeaway

If there’s one key message to remember, it’s this:

If you make things accessible for some, you make them accessible for all.

Someone might not have hearing issues, but they could be on a noisy bus. Someone might not have visual impairment, but they could be outside in bright sunlight. Someone might not have dexterity issues, but they might be walking while using their phone.

Accessibility improvements almost always improve usability for everyone.

Closing

Alun Lucas (Zuko):
Thank you very much today — it’s been really enlightening. There are several things you mentioned that I hadn’t considered before.

If anyone wants to ask follow-up questions, Amrdeep is available on LinkedIn and Twitter. We’ll also share the recording and slides, and everything will be hosted on the Zuko website and shared on social media.

Thanks everyone, and we’ll wrap it up there.

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