Form Accessibility Improvements

This session from FormFest 2024 focuses on accessibility, featuring British Columbia’s work to improve legal form usability and tips from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on making forms more accessible overall.

Balancing act: Redesigning legal forms for usability
Laryn Van Dyk, Erin Smith, Kylie Cheng

This presentation will explore the British Columbia government's redesign of the Provincial Court Family Rules forms. These complex forms have multiple purposes, serving the needs of a diverse group of users, each with their own priorities and concerns. For individuals navigating the family legal process without a lawyer, these forms are essential to have their voice heard and their needs met. User-centered forms reduce barriers, increase accessibility, and ensure people have fair and equal access to legal help and justice. In this presentation, we will focus on how we combined policy expertise with human-centered design methods to make the paper versions of these forms easier to use. Attendees will learn about the benefits of integrating policy and design, and how we worked with diverse user groups through methods including surveys, workshops, and user testing.

Accessibility-first design for documents
Alison Hiam
This fun and interactive presentation is designed to embed thinking about accessibility into our daily work processes. This is an accessibility 101 presentation but rather than focusing on compliance and checklists—the goal is to shift your mindset to include accessibility into every step of the process. Content note: this presentation does involve animations, but warning will be given before flashing or dramatic movements happen on screen.

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More from FormFest 2024
Explore other FormFest 2024 recordings: https://beeckcenter.org/formfest-reco...
Explore more form resources on the Digital Government Hub: https://digitalgovernmenthub.org
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About the Digital Service Network (DSN):
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