Over the years, Gravity Forms has increasingly committed to making your WordPress forms accessible to the widest audience possible. Partnering with accessibility experts within the WordPress community such as Amanda Rush has allowed us to ensure that forms created with Gravity Forms are compatible with accessibility tools such as screen readers.

Why Accessibility?

Accessibility is far more important than many people realize. If you’re one of the lucky people in this world who doesn’t need some sort of assisted technology, the thought may not have even crossed your mind. Here’s why you should work hard to ensure that your site is as accessible as possible.

Corporate Goodwill

There’s no doubt that people all over the planet love when companies do things to improve the world around them. When you donate your time and assets to make the world a better place, you can enjoy feeling great about yourself. In fact, many of your customers will likely also recognize your efforts and generate more traffic to your site.

Want some great PR for your company? Accessibility is a fantastic way to surround your business with people who love what you do.

Government Compliance

If you’re operating a government website in the US (or even receiving federal funds for your project), accessibility should be already on your radar. Thanks to the 503 Act, your website needs to be accessible to all users with disabilities. Due to several non-profit and government organizations utilizing Gravity Forms for their WordPress form needs, we aim to provide accessible forms to everyone, and you should too!

More Users = More Profit!

If your site isn’t accessible, you’re likely missing out on some great sales opportunities. How can you collect a lead from a blind person if they can’t fill out your forms successfully?

By making your site fully accessible to all users, you’ll gain valuable customers that could have otherwise left your site. If your competition is accessible, you likely not only lost a sale, but your competitors likely gained it profited from your loss.

What We’ve Done

Here’s a look at the accessibility improvements we’ve made over the years (and some coming soon):

• Disable tabindex by default within the field markup, unless explicitly enabled by the user.
• Ajax form IFrames show alternative an alternative attribute.
• Aria attributes display on required and invalid fields.
• Corrected an issue when inline styles are called within a list field.
• “onkeypress” actions also fire when an “onclick” event fires.
• HTML attributes are carefully chosen to enhance accessibility.

Not Just for Visitors

In addition to how the form is displayed, we’ve also worked hard to ensure that forms are easy to build and edit by everyone. We can proudly say that creating forms within our form editor is easier than ever for users who require accessibility tools such as a screen reader.

How You Can Help

Have we motivated you enough to want to make everything accessible? We hope so. Here’s how you can help make the world a more accessible place.

Making Your Site Accessible

Unfortunately, accessibility isn’t something that can be done with a single quick change or set of changes. It’ll take some time to understand the problems that may be plaguing your site and implementing accessible solutions. With that said, here are a few starting points:

• Use WordPress plugins that prioritize accessibility.
• Hire an accessibility consultant.
• Try to browse your site using a screen reader.
• Check your color schemes for issues.
• Use an accessibility checker such as WAVE or A-Checker.
• Implement ARIA tags into your code.

Help WordPress Plugin and Theme Authors Improve Accessibility

Another way that you can help improve accessibility is to help WordPress plugin and theme authors make their products more accessible. We’ve worked hard over the years to improve accessibility, but even we miss things from time to time. Letting us know about any accessibility issues you face with Gravity Forms helps us bring those issues to light and improve upon them.

The same goes for all other plugins and themes you use. If you notice an accessibility issue, bring it to the author’s attention. It’s likely that they didn’t realize the issue existed and will be happy to work with you to fix the problem. Bringing them code that fixes the problem will, in most cases, allow them to fix the problem immediately and they’ll love you for it.

If you have any accessibility concerns with Gravity Forms, feel free to reach out to us via our Contact Us page.

Improve Accessibility in WordPress Core

Did you know that over 25% of the internet uses WordPress and that number grows every day? One of the best ways to donate your time to accessibility is to help improve the accessibility of WordPress itself.

If you join the WordPress Accessibility Team, you’ll be able to make a huge impact on accessibility for a massive number of sites worldwide.

Even if you’re a beginner, there’s always something you can contribute, including testing or minor code changes.