Don’t fiddle too much with your forms‘ look and feel. A small innocent-looking piece of CSS, even when combined with semantically correct HTML, could leave you with a degraded User Experience and make your forms less Accessible.

Yesterday I went to see Girl at Kinepolis. Whilst ordering tickets I ran into an issue though: after completing the payment form – or at least I think I had – it complained about some incomplete fields.

🤐 Insert sidenote here about the error message not being very distinguishable from the rest of the page, it blends in whilst it should stand out.

Can you spot the missing completed field(s)?

After scratching my head for a while, it turned out that I hadn’t selected a payment method. So I selected one, and could continue on forwards.

🤐 Insert sidenote here about the active payment method indicator being red, which mostly is used to visually indicate errors.

Oh, those were options for me to choose from!?

Today, the day after, I revisited the form as I wanted to know why I had missed the payment method in the first place. I work in web, so completing forms shouldn’t be an issue to me, right? I first thought they’d be using some crazy markup/JS combo, but the good thing about this form is that they’ve actually used radio buttons for the payment method selection.

<div class="method-list"> <label class="method-list-item" data-method-list-item=""> <input type="radio" name="PaymentMethod" value="BCMC--Ogone--CreditCard" class="method-list-item-input" required=""> <span class="method-list-item-copy"> <img src="http://cms.kinepolis.megatix.be//media/1008/bcmc_combined.png" alt="BCMC"> </span> </label> <label class="method-list-item"> <input type="radio" name="PaymentMethod" value="MasterCard--Ogone--CreditCard" class="method-list-item-input" required=""> <span class="method-list-item-copy"> <img src="http://cms.kinepolis.megatix.be//media/1030/mastercard_2017.png" alt="MasterCard"> </span> </label> <label class="method-list-item"> <input type="radio" name="PaymentMethod" value="Visa--Ogone--CreditCard" class="method-list-item-input" required=""> <span class="method-list-item-copy"> <img src="http://cms.kinepolis.megatix.be//media/1005/visa.png" alt="Visa"> </span> </label> <label class="method-list-item"> <input type="radio" name="PaymentMethod" value="Maestro--Ogone--CreditCard" class="method-list-item-input" required=""> <span class="method-list-item-copy"> <img src="http://cms.kinepolis.megatix.be//media/1012/maestro_2017.png" alt="Maestro"> </span> </label> <label class="method-list-item"> <input type="radio" name="PaymentMethod" value="MasterPass--Ogone--MasterPass" class="method-list-item-input" required=""> <span class="method-list-item-copy"> <img src="http://cms.kinepolis.megatix.be//media/1023/masterpass-logo-featured-1.png" alt="MasterPass"> </span> </label> </div>

Great! As these elements are some of the basic building blocks of the web, they have built-in traits such as having the right semantics, being accessible, etc.

🏆 Extra bonus points for wrapping those inputs in a <label> by the way!

What’s going on then? Well, the “bad” thing about this form is that those radio buttons were visually hidden, as they’d been moved offscreen using a small piece of CSS — a not so uncommon technique:

.method-list-item-input { position: absolute; left: -99999px; }

Even though the form is semantically correct (Yay! 🎉), that little piece of CSS unfortunately introduces two nasty side-effects:

[#UX] Removed Affordance : When completing a form, a user scans for form controls which they need to complete. Since the payment method selector does not seem to contain any form controls, as it looks like a “Hey, here’s some logos of the supported payment methods for ya” kind of thing, the brain skips over it. [#A11Y] Removed focus indication When tabbing through the form you don’t know that the focus has hit the payment method radio buttons, so you unwillingly skip over it as you keep tabbing. This will give one the impression that they cannot complete the form without the use of a mouse. (It took me a while to figure out how you eventually can: when you’ve hit focus on the payment method selector, hit an arrow key to select one of the options)

Here’s a recording of me tabbing through the form, unknowingly skipping the payment method controls as I didn’t know it got focus:

Now, the fix to these side-effects is quite simple: Don’t try to be smart, and leave the radiobuttons be.

.method-list-item-input { /* position: absolute; */ /* left: -99999px; */ }

See what I did there?

Sprinkle some CSS on top to make ‘m all a bit more beautiful (alignment, position, color) and you’re good to go:

💁‍♂️ Here’s the CSS I used, in case you were wondering: .method-list-item { display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; border: 1px solid #bcbcbc; margin: 0.25em; padding: 0.25em 0.25em 1em 0.25em; } .method-list-item-input { /* position: absolute; */ /* left: -99999px; */ order: 2; } It adds an outline, adds some margin/padding, and visually moves the radio buttons below the logo (something which I personally find more pleasing). And yes, I know, those logos may be a tad smaller too …

Ah, these look like options to me!

Additionally, they could also add some extra CSS to visually indicate that the wrapping label.method-list-item has a focussed element within. This can be achieved using :focus-within (supported in all modern browsers except Edge):

label.method-list-item:focus-within { border-color: #2781a3; }

Here’s a recording of me tabbing through the form with all mentioned CSS adjustments applied:

A small change, lifting this form from a 9/10 up to a 10/10, no?

For your own forms, you can use these simple tricks to quickly check them for the issues I just mentioned here:

Tab through your forms (and your site in general) to see if you can access all controls. Controls should have a different look when they are focussed (e.g. so that you know they have focus) Think away labels and titles (or translate them to another language), and ask yourself if the meaning of the controls/elements still remain clear or not. (e.g. titles such as “Choose X” don’t indicate choice. Radio buttons / checkboxes / dropdowns do)

Of course those three won’t make a good form all by itself, as you can’t forget about other things the basics such as the use of good labels, grouping of controls, etc. — See Designing Better Forms for a good list of tips.

Here’s to good forms! 🥂