Case Study: Gravity Forms Powering the WP Accessibility Day Website
By Gravity Forms
Published May 14, 2024
If you’re interested in learning how Gravity Forms is being used in the wild to create fully accessible forms, this case study is for you.
In this article, you’ll learn how the team behind the annual WP Accessibility Day event website use Gravity Forms and its add-ons on its website, including handling speaker application submissions, attendee registrations and donations, user profile creation, sharing information outside of WordPress, and more.
If you’d like some inspiration on how you can use Gravity Forms to save time and publish fully accessible forms on your site, listen to the podcast or read on…
How WP Accessibility Day Uses Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is committed to accessibility and has sponsored the online WP Accessibility Day event for the last couple of years.
During the annual 24-hour online event, sessions are focused on promoting and learning website accessibility best practices for WordPress websites – if you haven’t attended yet, be sure not to miss the 2024 livestream!
As Gravity Forms is the form plugin for accessibility, we were excited – although not surprised – to learn that the WP Accessibility Day team has been using our plugin on their website.
With Gravity Forms you can easily create forms for almost any purpose that are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, making it a perfect fit to support an event like WP Accessibility Day.
Let’s take a look at how the WP Accessibility Day team used Gravity Forms to create a number of accessible forms to support and promote their event…
Speaker Application Submissions
As part of the process to apply to speak at Accessibility Day, applicants fill out a speaker application form. This form is built using Gravity Forms and our Advanced Post Creation Add-On.
Thanks to the Advanced Post Creation Add-On, a custom post type is created containing the details of the proposed speaker talk. And when the form is submitted, the post is saved as a draft, ready for the event organization team to scrutinize.
The process of selecting speakers is anonymous, so no user information is attached to the post. Once the organization team approves an application, its status is changed from draft to pending.
Anyone who submitted a successful application will be notified and those successful speaker applicants can then use the speaker onboarding form to complete the next steps.
As this form includes a dropdown field that was automatically populated with a list of all the pending posts, all the speakers have to do is select their pending post from the list and then provide additional information, such as details about themselves for their speaker bio.
This speaker bio content submitted via the onboarding form is used to create the public People posts on the site. Each People post is also automatically connected to the relevant Session post.
Thanks to these self-service forms and automation processes, the organization team has to simply check for errors before hitting publish.
This replaced the manual process used previously, which required extensive manual input, including post creation, uploading photos to the media library, setting them as featured images, adding alt tags, and copying and pasting content between forms and posts.
Attendee Registration
The WP Accessibility Day website also uses Gravity Forms to handle attendee registrations. Attendees sign up through an accessible registration form built using the Gravity Forms User Registration Add-On.
This had several benefits, including…
Attendee Profiles
As part of the registration process, a WordPress user account is automatically created on the site for each attendee.
In addition to enabling an attendee bio or profile to be created, the WordPress user account grants access to the attendee-only content on the site. The user accounts and profiles also enable attendees to request event swag and sign up for competitions through the website.
As the user profiles are created automatically and populated by the attendees, the event team saves a lot of time by not having to manually process these tasks.
Attendee Profile Self-Management
Attendees can also manage their accounts and profiles themselves through the front-end forms built with Gravity Forms.
There are two main benefits of this. Firstly, the attendees don’t need to access the potentially unfamiliar WordPress dashboard to manage their profiles. Secondly, the WP Accessibility Day staff no longer have to manually make changes to profiles, such as updating a bio or changing the profile visibility on behalf of the attendees, as they can now do all this themselves.
Again, this helps event organizers save time and reduce their admin overheads.
Attendee Donation Collection
Although the event is free, attendees have the option of making a donation during registration. Gravity Forms is easily able to facilitate payment collection via its many payment add-ons that integrate with a wide range of third-party payment processors.
Sharing Event Information Out Of WordPress
Although speaker, session, and attendee information is collected in WordPress, the information doesn’t have to stay there.
Thanks to the Gravity Forms Zapier Add-On, the WP Accessibility Day team was able to create workflows that automatically sent information from WordPress to other applications, such as Google Sheets, to help further organise the data and event.
Gravity Forms for Accessible Forms
Overall, the WP Accessibility Day organizers have found Gravity Forms to be accessible and time-saving, whilst also aligned with their values of making the web accessible for all.
Head on over to the WP Accessibility Day website to have a browse, check out the other accessible forms created with Gravity Forms, and sign up to their email list to keep up to date with news about the 2024 event.
You can see for yourself just how easy it is to create fully accessible forms for WordPress by signing up for a free Gravity Forms demo. And our extensive documentation and expert Support team can support you every step of the way.
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