Announcing FormLinter

Ben Orenstein

Between running FormKeep and completing dozens of client projects each year, we spend a lot of time thinking about forms.

Here are a few questions we ask ourselves for each form we write:

  • Did we remember to give every input a label? (No, placeholders are not an adequate replacement)
  • Do our labels’ for attributes match our inputs’ ids?
  • Did we take advantage of the url, email, and password input types, or did we forget and just use text?
  • Are our required fields marked as such?

Doing all these things right is worth the effort: improvements like these improve accessibility and increase conversions. However, checking this sort of thing by hand is tedious and error-prone.

Important but tedious? Sounds like a job for a program. So we wrote one!

It’s called FormLinter. Bet you can’t guess what it does. (It lints forms.)

Just supply the URL of a public page containing a form, and we’ll do the rest. We’ll show your form’s letter grade, a list of issues that hurt your score, and tips on fixing each one.

Better accessibility, more conversions, and no tedium.

Sound good? Give it a try.