Understanding Success Criterion 3.3.5: Help

Understanding Success Criterion 3.3.5 Help

Provide cues according to the context so that users with disabilities can perform actions without losing track of what they are doing

Official Requirements

3.3.5 Help: Context-sensitive help is available. (Level AAA)

Why is it required?

Users with cognitive impairments find it difficult to fill up forms or other places where it requires text input. Therefore, providing context-sensitive help or cues will help them to perform these tasks easily.

For example: An online job application 

Recruitment websites have forms for candidates to fill up so that it helps recruiters to select the right candidates. However, users with cognitive disabilities may find it difficult to understand the questions in the form. Hence, providing a help link that has instructions or explanations to answer the question will greatly help the user.

How do we fix it?

  • Provide a help link on each web page. Furthermore, you can also provide an assistant on the web page to aid users to fill up forms.
  • Provide an option to spell check and suggestions for text input
  • When the form requires a specific format, provide a label, adjacent text, or placeholder text that describes the correct format. For example Date: ‘DD/MM/YYYY’

Aditya Bikkani

Aditya Bikkani

Aditya is the COO of AELData, a growing technology company in the Digital Publishing and Education sectors. He is also an entrepreneur and founder of an accessibility tool called LERA. A W3C COGA (Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility) Community Member Aditya contributes to researching methodologies to improve web accessibility and usability for people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

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