Recently I discovered Contact Form 7 (CF7) by Takayuki Miyoshi. A plugin to create forms on a WordPress website. I was looking for an accessible alternative for Gravity Forms, and discovered that Contact Form 7 does an excellent job!

Up to now I used Gravity Forms, which is a great plugin. But it has some accessibility issues and has W3C validation errors for the HTML and CSS. Gravity Forms also doesn’t have an accessible backend.

Contact Form 7 recently (version 3.6) added accessible WAI-ARIA to the forms, e.g. for error messages and required fields. Also the plugin gives you complete controle over the HTML output of the form.

A second advantage of Contact Form 7 is that the backend is fully accessible, so a visually impaired content manager can build her own forms.

The only drawback is that the default form, provided by the plugin needs to be changed to make the form fully accessible, but that’s easily done, unlike with Gravity Forms.