Your gut feeling is right: PDF forms do tend to suffer more from accessibility issues. But it's possible to build accessible PDF, and all too easy to build inaccessible HTML forms.
Anyway, here goes on a few of the things to consider: - PDF forms are often sold by Adobe (and others) as being good 'because they replicate the familiar paper form'. This may or may not be a good thing in real life. Often, the old paper form is very bad to use indeed - from any point of view: filling it in, dealing with it, getting it into a database. - Sometimes moving to an HTML form is the excuse to thoroughly rexamine the use of the form. But you should be doing that for a PDF form anyway: there's no reason why technology should drive business investigation. - Many forms have a hybrid life: some existence on paper, some on the web. Users may want to print them out; they may need to be available in non-cyper locations such as in a sales rep's paperwork; they may require extensive notes that may be easier to deal with on paper; etc, etc. If so, there's often some benefit in having a PDF so it really does look exactly like the paper form, and so that people can use it as 'electric paper' for print on demand. - I'm totally technology independent i.e. lots of lovely other people build the stuff for my client and I don't usually have to worry about that part. But I get the impression from observing technical discussions that implementing 'save and resume' type features is a lot easier in HTML. And also conditional forms i.e. ones where what you get on the second page varies depeding on your answers to the first page (or varients thereof). - users expect some types of form to be HTML: registration, log on, checkout for example. Hope this helps Caroline Jarrett [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01525 370379 Effortmark Ltd Usability - Forms - Content ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
