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Why Accessible Forms Are a Business Imperative. Not Just a Compliance Requirement
- Mar 30
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 31
Accessibility isn’t a new topic. Most organizations have been hearing about it for years. What has changed is the context. Accessibility is no longer a future‑state ideal or a compliance conversation reserved for legal teams. It has become an operational reality that directly affects how organizations deliver services, manage risk, and serve their customers.
Forms sit right at the centre of this shift. They are where people apply, register, enroll, request, pay, and submit. For many organizations, forms are not a supporting experience, they are the experience. When a form is confusing, inaccessible, or difficult to complete, the failure isn’t abstract. People don’t get what they came for. And when that happens at scale, the business impact is very real.
This matters because accessibility challenges are far more common than many teams realize. In its 2025 analysis of the top one million websites, WebAIM found that 94.8% of homepages contained detectable WCAG failures, with an average of 51 accessibility errors per page. One of the most frequent issues identified was missing form input labels, a fundamental problem that directly affects anyone using screen readers or keyboard navigation.
The scale of the affected audience is also often underestimated. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that more than 1.3 billion people live with some form of disability. In Canada, 27% of adults aged 15 and older report having a disability, according to Statistics Canada’s most recent Canadian Survey on Disability.
When forms are inaccessible, the consequences show up quickly. People abandon applications. Support teams absorb the fallout. Manual workarounds appear. Data quality suffers. Trust erodes. In many cases, these costs are hidden because they don’t appear on a single report. They surface as delays, repeat contacts, and frustrated users who simply stop trying.
There is also a growing legal dimension that organizations can no longer ignore. Digital accessibility lawsuits continue to rise year over year. According to UsableNet’s 2025 Midyear Digital Accessibility Lawsuit Report, more than 2,000 ADA‑related digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the first half of 2025 alone, with projections showing a nearly 20% increase over 2024 by year‑end. These cases increasingly focus on websites and digital forms as “gateways” to goods and services.
UsableNet report: https://info.usablenet.com/hubfs/2025-MidYear-Report-FINAL.pdf
Other industry analyses put the full‑year number even higher. EcomBack’s annual report documents 3,948 ADA website accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025, a 23.8% increase over the previous year, with consumer‑facing organizations most frequently targeted.
What’s important to understand is that accessibility is rarely the only issue in these situations. Inaccessible forms often create broader user experience problems for everyone. Research across usability and form analytics consistently shows that form abandonment rates hover between 60–70% across industries, with error handling, unclear instructions, and poor navigation among the most common causes. Studies compiled by FormStory and usability researchers highlight that application and checkout forms can see abandonment rates exceeding 75–80% when friction is high.
Form abandonment statistics:
Accessible design principles directly address many of these failure points. Clear labels, meaningful error messages, logical navigation order, sufficient color contrast, and predictable behavior make forms easier to understand and faster to complete for all users, not just those using assistive technology. This is why accessibility improvements often deliver some of the largest overall gains in completion rates and data accuracy.
Despite this, many organizations still struggle to act. Not because they disagree with the importance of accessibility, but because it feels overwhelming. Teams aren’t always sure which standards apply. Ownership is often fragmented across departments. There may be hundreds or thousands of existing forms already in production. And there is a persistent fear that addressing accessibility means tearing everything down and starting over.
That fear is understandable, and often misplaced. Accessibility does not have to be a one‑time remediation scramble or a massive redesign effort. The organizations that make meaningful progress tend to approach accessibility as an ongoing program rather than a checkbox exercise. They focus first on the forms that matter most. They prioritize based on risk, usage, and impact. They build consistency into how forms are created and maintained. And they treat accessibility as part of delivering a reliable, usable service, not as a separate compliance task.
The conversation, ultimately, needs to shift. Accessibility is not about perfection on day one. It’s about removing barriers that prevent people from completing critical tasks. It’s about reducing friction that already costs organizations time, money, and trust. It’s about building digital experiences that hold up as regulations evolve, technologies change, and user expectations continue to rise.
Accessibility is a legal requirement, but it is also a signal of operational maturity. Organizations that invest in accessible forms are better positioned to serve broader audiences, reduce long‑term risk, and deliver experiences that work in the real world, not just on paper.
Understanding why accessibility matters is the first step. Seeing how real accessibility issues are addressed in real forms, without disrupting existing processes, is the next. That’s why we’re hosting Making Forms Accessible in Practice: Live Remediation with AEM Forms Designer, a hands‑on session focused on moving from awareness to action. If accessibility feels important but overwhelming, this is where it starts.
