Sonia Forms: Accessibility Tips

Tips for accessibility considerations in Sonia forms

Nov 4, 2025
Knowledge

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Sonia Forms: Accessibility Tips

Answer

Sonia Forms: Accessibility Tips

When designing forms in Sonia you may wish to take into account accessibility. Typically, this means supporting a user who needs a screen reader or similar device to read the form and know where and what to enter. A screen reader will interpret the text on the screen and speak the words using a synthetic voice through the computer’s audio device.

Screen readers can look for information embedded in the web page to help make sense of the layout and content of the page. For example, they expect pictures/images to include a tag explaining the purpose of the image.

In most cases Sonia takes care of all details for this. Images that you may paste into Label fields will have this information added to them automatically so that accessibility tools will find them. Fields without Descriptions (for example data entry fields in a table) will have the name of the field automatically added as a label.

Some simple things to watch for:

The pencil icon that appears next to editable fields has a Title and Alt tag of “editable”
Images in labels have Alt tags, but they are blank – so don’t rely on images to convey meaning
The mandatory symbol (a red * to the right of the field) – you may wish to add an explanation for this in the heading label of your form.
As much as you can, put a Header row in table designs. Readers recognise the header tag as a key to the data in the rest of the table.

In general, when you are designing forms for accessibility, follow some simple rules:

Avoid embedding images, especially if they have important meaning or content that must be read before completing the form
Choose font sizes and colours that are easy to read (Your Marketing team may be able to help with this.)
Use field types that work best with readers – perhaps vertical multi-choice works better than a dropdown list.