Screen reader issue

Hi @sarahwishart Welcome to the community! While our forms aren’t fully compatible with screen readers yet, we do suggest adding a short description to your pictures will help people with visual impairment. Even though this label is not visible in your typeform, screen readers will read it out loud.

In the meantime, any feedback you have would be great to send to our product team, and I’ve also asked them for any timeline as to when we might have this feature available. 

That’s disappointing. We know how to use alt text and there’s no pictures in our forms.

And as a human rights charity this needs to be absolutely standard - and I’ve seen that there’s been this request running to your product team for some years now repeatedly. So sadly this means I will have to start looking for a replacement for Typeform.

Hi again, @sarahwishart I stand corrected! Our product team let me know that our forms are compatible with screen readers - apologies for the misinformation. 

Could you please share more details about what specifically isn’t working so I can share this feedback with them? 

Hi - hmmmm that’s interesting - do you have details of the screen readers that you work to? So we can flag that?

I’ve also got in touch with the representative from a disability group who’d flagged the issue with me to see if they’ve more considered feedback - though obviously its not front and centre at Typeform as you weren’t aware about it and I’ve a few searches to see if there was anything beyond your accessibility statement (and a lot of pages saying you don’t cater for them yet)

I’ll let you know what I hear back from the disability group but if you’ve any top tips or ‘how to best...’ guides to this functionality in Typeform - that’d be really great.

Hi @sarahwishart I’ll ask them! We’ve been making a lot of updates over here for various features, including accessibility, so it’s purely just me that was behind in the update (not Typeform as a company). 

While we do have the article here about accessibility and building accessible forms, I do agree we could have something a little more concrete publicly. Is there anything specifically you’d like to see? I’m happy to let them know that as well. 

Hi - thank you - I have seen the article and shared it with the relevant groups giving us feedback but I think a screen reader specific one would be great - suggesting best practice and also - knowing what screen-readers for the different systems you’ve been using to test that they’re compatible would be great - because we can flag that and build using those to test our own forms out.

Best

Sarah

Hi @sarahwishart Thank you! That’s really helpful and makes sense. I’ve shared this with them.  The product team may already be off for the day since they’re primarily based in Spain, but hopefully I should hear from them by Monday about any specificities on screen readers. 

Hello.

I am writing a reply to this thread as I turn to you with the same issue that sarahwishart started.

Our company loves the Typeforms, but recently we started creating forms targeting people with visual impairments, and their feedback states that the forms have slight problems with accessibility.

For example, when using the VoiceOver screen reader, the placeholder texts in inputs or textareas are read out, which is unnecessary.

Second, the labels of the fields in the new “Contact Info” feature are not read out, so it is hard to understand which input requires the name, last name, phone, email or company name. Instead, the screen reader reads the main label for each of the inputs.

When inspecting the fields with Chrome Developer Tools, you can see that all the inputs have both, the aria-labelledby and aria-label attributes. VoiceOver prefers to read out the label set by the aria-labelledby attribute, which creates the confusion.

I hope this info helps to make the forms more accessible in the future updates.

All the best,

Indrek

Hi @indrek Thanks for stopping by and sharing your feedback! I’ve passed this along to the team that works on the accessibility features, and they also let me know they’re already working on addressing some of your concerns. 😀

@Liz , our team receiving similar feedback from individuals who use screen readers, saying that our survey is not accessible. One person said “I could not enter my selection for my age, thus could not complete the survey.  I use a screen reader to access the computer, and could not read the choices to answer the question, nor figure out how to control the field where the response was to be selected.”

Our understanding was that Typeform is WCAG 2.1, Level AA compliant and tested on all standard screen readers. Can you advise? The survey is live and intended for this audience, so it is very disappointing to see that they are running into issues.

Here is a link to the Typeform. Thank you.

Hi @Davin Thanks for stopping by! Do you know what computer and screen reader those respondents are using? 

No. We had an accessibility consultant review the survey before we went live and give us the green light. I do not know what software they were using either. After this complaint, here are a few things we identified after playing around with two different screen readers (Mac Voiceover and ChromeVox) to try and pinpoint the issue:

• To navigate answer options under questions that require one answer, you must use the TAB key, then the arrow keys to navigate between answers.
• To navigate answer options under questions that allow for multiple answers, however, you muse use the TAB key to navigate between answers, not arrow keys. This inconsistency seems unnecessary and confusing.
• These screen readers will read the Description on Statement questions, however, they will not read the Description text on any other question type.
• It seems these screen readers do not work on ranking-type questions, or at least we could not figure out how to navigate them.

To try and address these issues, we’ve changed all drop-downs/ranking type questions to multiple choice and removed all description text from any question types that are not Statements:

• Added the following text to single-answer questions: Choose one. You may use the TAB and arrow keys to navigate through answer options.
• Added the following text to multiple-selection questions: You may choose as many as you like by using the TAB key to navigate through answer options.

This extra text in the question sections makes them very unwieldy; it is unfortunate that the Description section is not usable.

Accessibility is extremely important to us, as it should be to Typeform and every single one of your users. Can these issues please be prioritized and addressed promptly? Please let us know what kind of timeframe we can expect. Thank you.

Hi @Davin 

We do regular accessibility tests on our typeforms using an external company called Fable. We always run our tests on multiple types of assistive technology to ensure the best experience possible. 

We do know that the ranking block continues to be quite a hard block for most visually impaired users. Maybe we can look at adding some additional information for screen readers on how to navigate. The way to go through them is by tabbing onto an item, then tab again so that the focus is on the dropdown within the item and then you can press enter to open the dropdown and use the arrow keys to choose the position.

As for the descriptions not being read out, I was not able to produce this on Mac VoiceOver. I can navigate to it using the VO+left arrow navigation. Or is the expectation that this is being read out at the same time as the question.

For the navigation difference between single selection or multiple selection, the screen reader says that the group is either a radio button (single selection) or checkbox (multiple selection) so most screen reader users know how to navigate these.

Thanks for sharing your findings. I will make note of them and bring them to the team.

Joyce