Building Accessible React Forms: A Step-by-Step Guide
Why Accessibility Matters
Creating a more inclusive web is crucial in today’s digital landscape. By making our React apps more accessible, we can ensure that everyone can use them, regardless of their abilities. In this article, we’ll explore how to build accessible React forms using the popular react-icons library and the ReachUI library.
The Power of React Icons
React Icons provides thousands of free, open-source icons, including popular libraries like Font Awesome and Material Design. With ES6 imports, you can include only the icons your project needs. We’ll use react-icons to target user inputs and add visual descriptions to form fields, making our app more user-friendly.
Benefits of React Icons
- Quick installation via npm
- Optimized for accessibility by default
- Easy to find variations of icons
- Memory-friendly with a small footprint
- Open-source for commercial and non-commercial projects
Building an Accessible Contact Form
Let’s build a contact form to collect user details, making it accessible using Reach UI’s components and React Icons.
Prerequisites
- Prior knowledge of React (helpful but not mandatory)
- Xcode or Android Studio installed
- Node 10+ installed
Getting Started
Use the create-react-app CLI tool to start a new React project. Run the following commands to install necessary packages and start the local development server:
npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm start
Designing the Contact Form
We’ll use ReachUI components to build the form fields, making it accessible and user-friendly. We’ll also use React Icons to provide visual descriptions.
Dependencies
We’ll reuse existing libraries to help us build this project:
- ReachUI for building and styling the form
- React Icons for providing icons
- Bootstrap for a responsive form
- React DatePicker for date picking
Installing Dependencies
Run the following commands in the project’s root folder:
npm install reach-ui react-icons bootstrap react-datepicker
Building the Contact Form
Create a new src/components/Contact.js file and update it with the code below:
We’ve imported external components to help us implement the necessary functionalities. Let’s take a closer look at their features:
<Combobox>: An accessible input box component from ReachUI, abiding by ARIA element specifications<Menu/>: The ReachUI Menu component provides dropdown selection functionalities, making it accessible and keyboard-friendly<React Icons/>: We’ll use Material Design icons from react-icons to make our form fields more visually descriptive- React DatePicker: A reusable Datepicker component for building React applications, making it keyboard-accessible and efficient
Defining the Form Fields
We’ll use the components we’ve imported to build out the desired form fields. Let’s start with the name input field:
We’ve used the <Combobox/> component to define the field, wrapping the MDPermIdentity icon inside a HTML label tag for added visual accessibility. We’ve also applied the same functionality across other text input fields.
The Area Input Field
We’ll use the <Menu/> component from ReachUI to accessibly power the residential location selection field. Here’s how we implement it:
The Menu component has extended accessibility features, wrapping around usual HTML elements.
Congratulations!
You’ve successfully built an accessible contact form in React using React Icons and ReachUI. This guide aims to provide a hands-on approach to building accessible React forms. You can find the source code with all the styles in the project repository.
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