General comments

The University of Arizona has set up guidelines for webmasters to follow in making their sites accessible to persons with disabilities. These are outlined at www.arizona.edu/uaweb/accessible/index.php/. There are various items listed under Phase I, and two of them relate to web forms:

• adding a contact for your form
• adding a label tag and matching label attribute for each of the labels associated with your form fields.

You can add contact information using the normal display screen in Dreameaver.

An example of a contact

The exact phrasing of your contact would depend on your form. The purpose of the link is to either provide an email or perhaps a phone number for persons to contact to provide information you are asking for on the form. Or to provide an option to send a person an ASCII or a Word file with the questions you are asking. Or you might be providing a way for people to get a document which is filled out and faxed to you.

This is an example of a contact:

This option is primarily aimed at persons using perhaps a Braille device or a screen reader to read web pages, and older versions may not be able to deal with a form. But this option could also be used by others.

As an aside, I have used as the contact on this form what is called an alias email. If you have accounts on the AgServer for email, you can request an alias be set up. It looks like an email, but in reality it forwards mail to two or more regular (individual) emails on the AgServer. The advantage of using an alias is that you do not have an email set up which is not checked; also messages can be sent to multiple people, in case one person is out of the office. The disadvantage is that everyone who gets the alias needs to understand who is the primary responder to messages posted to the alias address.

This document is part of a set of tutorials related to putting a form on your website. The initial page is found at cals.arizona.edu/ecat/forms/olderforms.html