Midpoint Review - Accessibility Feedback - IVC Forms, 10-7959a, CHAMPVA Claim form

[briandeconinck]

Next Steps for the VFS team

• [ ] Assign this ticket to the team member(s) responsible for addressing feedback provided by Platform.
• [ ] Comment on this ticket:
  • If the Platform reviewer has any Thoughts/Questions that require responses.
  • When Must feedback has been incorporated. As appropriate, link to any other GitHub issues or PRs related to this feedback.
  • When Should/Consider feedback has been incorporated, or if any feedback will not be addressed. As appropriate, link to any other GitHub issues or PRs related to this feedback.
• [ ] Questions? For the most timely response, comment on Slack in your team channel tagging @platform-governance-team-members.
• [ ] Close the ticket when all feedback has been addressed.

Thoughts/questions

• As always, so grateful to the detailed accessibility annotations you provide!

Feedback

Practice areas will document their feedback on the VFS-provided artifacts following the Must, Should, and Consider Framework. Platform Governance reviewers may also provide additional notes that don’t comment on the artifacts themselves but are important for implementation (eg. engineering/coding notes).

• [x] Consider: Echoing Erin's IA feedback, I think an explanatory "Now we're going to ask you for..." page before the medical claims flow could be helpful. Those steps to give a user a chance to gather their thoughts and their materials can do a lot to reduce cognitive load.
• [x] Consider: For authenticated users, consider adding text to those explanatory pages reminding users that their submission is autosaved and they can leave and come back if needed. Long form flows can be stressful! And they're even harder if you're experiencing anxiety, if you can't concentrate on a screen for long periods without triggering a headache, if you have trouble holding attention for long periods of time, etc. Sometimes it's helpful to remind users that they can step away if they need to.
• [x] Should: Rebecca mentioned the italic text in her content feedback, and I'll echo -- probably best to stay clear of it, as recommended by the style guide. There are some circumstances where italics don't necessarily hurt readability (or, more specifically, there's no clear research indicating either way), but it's generally safer to avoid it.
• [x] Engineering note: When you have a conditionally revealed field, the annotation indicates an aria-live="polite" to notify users of the change. I don't think that's strictly necessary here. The design system rules for conditionally revealing inputs should hopefully mitigate the need for an aria-live region here, since it'll always be the next tab stop and it'll always be immediately relevant to what the user just did, and announcing it might be a little more verbose than we need. That said, if you find it tests better with actual humans when the aria-live region is there, please report back! (And loop in Jeana Clark on the forms team too!)
• [x] Engineering note: There are a few points where you have helper text that's annotated to be associated via aria-describedby. That's fine, but I'd encourage exploring using a fieldset/legend pattern instead, eg.

  <fieldset>
    <legend>
       <h3>Sponsor information</h3>
       <span class="make-it-look-like-regular-text">Enter the information for the sponsor...</span>
    </legend>
    [all of the inputs]
  </fieldset>

  That pattern (1) avoids aria-describedby, which may be skipped for JAWS users who have personalized their verbosity settings, and (2) should ensure the helper text is announced once when tabbing into the fieldset, as opposed to being added to the end of all of the inputs in the fieldset. Not a must, but might be a pattern to try.

Governance team actions

• [x] Format feedback as individual tasks (check boxes)
• [ ] Assign this ticket to the VFS team member that opened the Slack request
• [x] Add the VFS team product label
• [x] Add the VFS team the feature label (if applicable)
• [x] Add the touchpoint labels
• [x] Add the practice area labels
• [x] Add the Collaboration Cycle initiative milestone

[briandeconinck]

Sorry for the delayed feedback!

[syd-hoeper]

Just commenting here to say that all feedback has been addressed and implemented. We are not going to add the primer page before the uploads because we've switched the flow to only one claim at a time, so the entire process is much shorter now and less overwhelming

[syd-hoeper]

@marywang2 This ticket is complete and can be closed