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Error prevention mechanism (AA)

Silktide finds forms on your pages and asks you to confirm that submissions with serious consequences can be reversed, checked, or confirmed before they take effect. This applies to forms that create legal or financial commitments, change or delete a user's stored data, or submit test responses.

Why this matters

A form with real-world consequences turns a slip of the finger into a real loss: an order shipped to last year's address, a deleted document, a legal declaration submitted with the wrong figures. People with motor, vision, or cognitive disabilities make these slips more often, and are less likely to spot them before pressing submit.

Giving people a chance to review or undo protects everyone, and for legal, financial, and data-changing forms it is a accessibility requirement.

How to fix it

For each affected form, provide at least one of these safeguards:

  1. Reversible - the submission can be undone, for example a cancellation window on orders or a "restore" option for deleted data.
  2. Checked - entered data is validated for errors, and the user is given the chance to correct them before the submission takes effect.
  3. Confirmed - a review step shows what is about to be submitted and asks the user to confirm it.

A checkout that shows an order summary before the final "Place order" button is the classic confirmation step.

Forms without such consequences - contact forms, search boxes, newsletter signups - are not required to have these safeguards. If a flagged form is one of these, or already has a safeguard, the finding.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Find every form on each page.
  2. Skip forms with no fields a visitor can actually use (hidden or non-interactive forms), and any elements you have excluded from checking.
  3. Flag each remaining form for your review. Silktide cannot determine whether a form is legal, financial, or data-changing, nor whether a confirmation step exists later in the process, so a human decides.

Troubleshooting

My form is just a contact form

This check flags forms so you can classify them - it does not claim every form needs a safeguard. If the form cannot commit the user to anything or change their data, approve it.

The confirmation step is on a later page

Silktide examines each page independently and cannot follow a multi-step submission. If your process ends with a review-and-confirm step, the form complies; approve the finding.

Learn more

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