BLUF: Let's prototype a tool that helps government staff improve the web forms they use to deliver public services, by giving feedback on the forms they have and making recommendations about a how they could be easier to use and more accessible—a "linter" for web forms.
Government services almost always require some information from the resident hoping to access said service. As a result, government websites are dominated by web forms. Many of these web forms are not easy to use. To be fair, designing forms isn't as easy as you'd think. It can be hard to evaluate without running through all of the different permutations of your users might input. An evaluation service for web forms, similar to the myriad JS & CSS "linters" out there, could be really handy.
A first implementation could be totally concierged—upload your HTML & CSS file, and we'll manually "lint "that sucker for you in 24 hours. If it proves valuable to anyone, maybe step two is to farm it out to Mechanical Turk. If warranted, we could actually begin to evaluate forms programmatically by webdriving the provided URL or something to that effect.
Like JS & CSS linters, it could give both "red cards" and "yellow cards" for syntactical errors and failures to meet best practices, respectively. Perhaps it could even have "green cards" for those extra mile usability boosters. It could really help designers up their accessibility game. I'll leave it to the wisdom of this crowd to brainstorm on the ruleset (there are tons of resources out there), but some example evaluations might include:
All form controls have labels (red card)
Required fields are clearly marked (red card)
Avoid optional fields (yellow card)
There are no placeholders (yellow card)
In-line form field validation (yellow card)
Recognizes credit card type by number inputted (red card)
Input types are correctly defined, trigger appropriate mobile keyboard (red card)
Fields are appropriate length (yellow card)
Type size and tap tagets
SO MANY MORE
cc @cydharrell @ondrae @lippytak @mollymcleod @davidrleonard + many others
BLUF: Let's prototype a tool that helps government staff improve the web forms they use to deliver public services, by giving feedback on the forms they have and making recommendations about a how they could be easier to use and more accessible—a "linter" for web forms.
Government services almost always require some information from the resident hoping to access said service. As a result, government websites are dominated by web forms. Many of these web forms are not easy to use. To be fair, designing forms isn't as easy as you'd think. It can be hard to evaluate without running through all of the different permutations of your users might input. An evaluation service for web forms, similar to the myriad JS & CSS "linters" out there, could be really handy.
A first implementation could be totally concierged—upload your HTML & CSS file, and we'll manually "lint "that sucker for you in 24 hours. If it proves valuable to anyone, maybe step two is to farm it out to Mechanical Turk. If warranted, we could actually begin to evaluate forms programmatically by webdriving the provided URL or something to that effect.
Like JS & CSS linters, it could give both "red cards" and "yellow cards" for syntactical errors and failures to meet best practices, respectively. Perhaps it could even have "green cards" for those extra mile usability boosters. It could really help designers up their accessibility game. I'll leave it to the wisdom of this crowd to brainstorm on the ruleset (there are tons of resources out there), but some example evaluations might include:
cc @cydharrell @ondrae @lippytak @mollymcleod @davidrleonard + many others