Digital forms can make access to services more equitable, but they need to be within reach; currently, gaps range from inaccessible PDFs to products that aren’t operable with screen readers. There are steps governments can take, like accessibility audits, to improve users’ experience. Notably, by 2026 or 2027 depending on jurisdiction size, all governments must comply with a federal mandate requiring all digital products to be accessible for the more than 1 in 4 U.S. residents with a disability.
Experts explored these topics Tuesday during FormFest 2025, hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University and Code for America. While forms were the main topic, the implications for digital government are broader.
“Remember, when we are talking about forms, we are really talking about services,” Karissa Minnich said during one session. Minnich serves as the civic design manager for The Lab @ DC, an applied research and design team within Washington, D.C.’s Office of the City Administrator.
Minnich authored a guide that was released Tuesday, A Field Guide to Fix Government Forms, to support government form design by sharing lessons learned within The Lab @ DC and best practices.
Poorly designed forms, Minnich said, can not only serve as a “tedious barrier,” but they can also dehumanize or even feel incriminating for an individual. Poor form design can be a result of a lack of user testing, or even the sometimes siloed nature of disparate government systems. But there are specific steps that can alleviate poor form design, as outlined both in the guide and throughout FormFest 2025.
MOBILE-FIRST DESIGN IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP
Governments are increasingly focused on mobile-first design, or platforms that are designed with a focus on accessibility for users using a website via smartphone, who comprise the majority of users. However, for forms to be accessible, this is only the first consideration, experts advise.
About 80 percent of users on mass.gov are accessing the platform from their mobile devices, Alexandra DeVoe, an accessibility engineer for the state of Massachusetts, said during a session. Of those mobile users, the majority are using a high-contrast visual theme. Users may also be accessing the platform through different browsers; developers can use Google Chrome’s built-in tools to test how a form differs across devices.
“It needs to work on everything,” DeVoe said.
While design systems like the United States Web Design System offer guidance on accessibility best practices for features including color contrast, DeVoe underlined that accessibility requires comprehensive testing: “So, my recommendation is: do your own testing.”
Notably, testing forms with a screen reader can reveal challenges specific to the user experience with that assistive technology, Sean Isamu Johnson, designer and researcher for the Center for Civic Design, said in a session. This technology aims to replicate a sighted user’s experience, he said. For example, a sighted user can recognize a headline based on its size and placement, but for someone using a screen reader, it will announce a tag to identify text as part of the headline. Unclear alt text or error messages may be solvable challenges for sighted users, but can create a significant barrier to those who are blind or have low vision, he said.
“Accessibility is delicate; it doesn’t take much for somebody’s experience to get completely derailed,” he said.
Another important consideration when designing forms, Minnich said, is simplicity. When working on a form with the D.C. Department on Disability Services, income information was requested so that the department could determine what funding source would support services. The team at The Lab @ DC recommended this information be collected in person after eligibility was determined, to reduce the initial barrier of connecting with staff. This change reduced the time required to fill out the form and mitigated people assuming income was part of eligibility criteria.
Forms can serve as the front door to services, but in many cases, users will still require human support. As such, well-designed forms should make it clear to users where and how they can get human assistance if needed in the process, Minnich said.
FORMLESS: AN ALTERNATIVE ROUTE TO REGISTRATION
In some cases, forms are being modernized or replaced by alternative channels like automation and AI.
Automatic enrollment shaped Philadelphia’s Zero Fare pilot, which aimed to support the 1 in 5 city residents living in poverty, improving access to public transit through fully subsidized transit passes for qualifying residents.
The city had access to data that would determine residents’ eligibility: specifically, their date of birth, residential address to send the Zero Fare card; and their income eligibility, through means-tested program data. The city’s Office of Integrated Data for Evidence and Action identified more than 375,000 who met the criteria, according to Cassandra Henderson, Philadelphia director of research, analytics, and evaluation.
While the user’s experience with this program is formless, Henderson noted that forms still played a “crucial” role in creating the back-end infrastructure and obtaining the administrative data that made the pilot possible.
The city used a lottery process to select 37,500 participants, and officials were able to mail the cards to 95 percent of participants without requiring action on their end. Sixty-five percent used those cards, as detailed by Nicola Coakley, Philadelphia research and policy manager. While there is not yet a “perfect benchmark” against which to compare this uptake rate, officials have found that nearly 10 million trips have been taken on public transit since the cards’ distribution. The program’s scale is attributed to both the capacity enabled by automatic enrollment and its pricing model, Coakley said.
