Intro And Overview

Hello and welcome to the Forms Week, Forms Tutorial Week. This week we're going through the Forms Tutorial. This is the easiest way to give you both, like something to read and something to listen to. And so we're going through this.

Now, forms are everywhere on the web. Whenever you interact with content, whenever you can leave a comment or upvote something, that's all what we consider form elements, anything that has interactions.

So forms are super widespread, super important, and you can't basically not use them if you want to have some interactivity with your users.

And because you have this interactivity, of course, it's incredibly important that it is accessible because otherwise, you know, you can't reach those customers.

And there are a couple of technical things that we will look at, but there are also a lot of non-technical things.

when you are designing a form input, and if that's like a simple form, like common form,

it's usually pretty straightforward. You know, you go like, oh, these are the things

that we want from you. And then you have, you know, just a submit button, something like that,

pretty straightforward. But sometimes you have these like very complex forms where you have

multiple steps. And then, you know, it's much more about like the design of the form,

in addition to the technical correctness. Because something that is technically okay,

can still be very, very hard to use, or impossible to use even, although it's technically accessible,

you know, if your wording is bad, if you have a lot of steps in between, you don't want to do that.

So at some point, form creation becomes like more of a, you know, an art instead of a science.

But you always need both, of course.

And so I think that's like one of the biggest challenges when you get to like complex forms that you have that.

Now, traditionally, forms send data to the server and then, you know, there was a response back.

So if you have something like a comment form on a website, on a blog, you type in your comment and you press send and that data gets taken and sent to the server, which then saves it into a database and keeps a record of it.

And then, you know, gets back to you, basically answers that request and says, yeah, hey, I've saved this.

And then you get like the page reloads and you get this information.

Yes, comment has been sent or just appears or something like that.

But there are a lot of form controls these days on websites that don't do strictly the server roundtrip stuff.

So you see that you have comment and you press send.

And instead of like reloading the page, it just uses JavaScript to send it to the back end and then displays a message to you.

It might not make too much difference for you as a non-disabled person if you are one of those.

But, you know, giving that response and feedback back to the users is incredibly important.

And so you have to think about that as well.