Website Accessibility Tips #9 : descriptive form error messages
Chandesh Parekh
Digital Solutions for Business: Reputation Marketing, Web Development & Web Accessibility | Specialising in reputation marketing for community pharmacies
In my last article I covered the placement and styling of form error messages to help your website users to quickly and clearly identify which fields on a form had errors.
In today's article I want to cover the format of the error messages.
All too often you'll find an error message that says "Error. Please fix." or something similarly unhelpful. After all, errors aren't made consciously. If the field description (which I cover in another article, link in the comments below) wasn't clear enough for the user to understand, providing a basic error message is hardly likely to result in a successful re-submission of your form.
Some forms are simple enough that very descriptive error messages are not required e.g. a contact form with fields for a name, email address and a message.
But for more complex forms, it's advisable to provide contextual messages so your users have very little need of filling in a field more than twice.
A good example of a field that requires a helpful error message is the phone number field. In order to prevent the wrong format from being used developers will often add format validation e.g. asking the user to add an international dialling code, but 'international dialling code' has different meaning to different users e.g. some people may use "+44" and others may use (0044).
Likewise, some people may enter in a phone number with spaces and some may use dashes instead of spaces and others may not use spaces at all!
If the phone number field validation is really tight - and there are occasions where this is warranted - then your user may have to fill in the phone number field two or three times in order to get it right if the only error message they receive is something like "Enter phone number using the correct format."
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Instead, having the error message state clearly what the required format is means the user gets it wrong only the one time (of course if a proper description is provided in the first place the user won't get it wrong even once!).
So, help your users by providing form field error messages that are contextual and helpful - remember, the more frustration your user feels in filling out your website form the poorer their user experience and the less likely they are to engage with your brand again.
Other articles in this series on making your website forms more accessible and user-friendly:
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3 年That’s a good point about some people entering 0044 or using dashes instead of spaces. Hadn’t thought of that before. Thanks Chandesh Parekh
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3 年Another common sense piece with advice that some developers need to heed Chandesh It's the out of the box settings that some do not bother to fit to the environment. This is a prime example of going budget or engaging a team to do it right? ??
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3 年Chandesh Parekh Error messages are the biggest pain point when filling out forms. I am looking into ways for forms to check inputs are each field rather than at the end of the submission which may make for an easier process.
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3 年I must admit Chandesh Parekh error messages are one of the most frustrating things aren't they. Thanks for the explanation
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3 年Great advice as al was Chandesh - thank you!