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On the use of forms

Hairyloon

I've been fighting with the court about their application forms as a point of principle, but in the course of proceedings the question has raised of whether people with divergent mental makeup might actually really struggle.
They do give me some trouble, when they ask questions that are not relevant in my case: there is always some doubt about leaving things blank.

While i hesitate to call autism a disability, it is legally recognised as one, and if people do actually struggle with unnecessary forms, then maybe I should carry on the fight for their benefit.

Any thoughts?

Parents

  • Depends on the form. Problems with them can vary.

    If it's a word form, sometimes they'll be set up in a way that doesn't allow things like new line characters which makes it awkward to inout text. Other times they're not created as forms but as normal documents. I think whoever created it thought of people printing them out, or just considered what it looks like, not how easy it is to actually fill out. Then when you start typing into it all of the formatting of the document goes wrong. Sometimes I have probably spent as long fixing the formatting as I have completing the form.

    For web forms the common problem I encounter is nedlessly mandatory fields. For work I had to do some online training. There were about 25 modules. After every module it would ask you for feedback. Think it was about 5 multiple choice questions and some free text boxes. Every one of them mandatory, and it wouldn't mark the module as complete until you completed them all. I would put off doing modules because of the feedback section. It took a few months to get through the modules between work. Just as I finished them, they re-issued the training to all employees on a different platform. So I've now got to do them all again. Hopefully no mandatory feedback this time.

    That's just usability issues with forms. On top of that there's poorly worded questions, or in the case of autism assesment I was sent an outdated form. Luckily I had saved all of my answers. The autism assessment one felt like it was designed to be triggering. I think I even put it as one of the amswers that I struggled with the ambiguity and different sets of instructions I was provided. 

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  • Depends on the form. Problems with them can vary.

    If it's a word form, sometimes they'll be set up in a way that doesn't allow things like new line characters which makes it awkward to inout text. Other times they're not created as forms but as normal documents. I think whoever created it thought of people printing them out, or just considered what it looks like, not how easy it is to actually fill out. Then when you start typing into it all of the formatting of the document goes wrong. Sometimes I have probably spent as long fixing the formatting as I have completing the form.

    For web forms the common problem I encounter is nedlessly mandatory fields. For work I had to do some online training. There were about 25 modules. After every module it would ask you for feedback. Think it was about 5 multiple choice questions and some free text boxes. Every one of them mandatory, and it wouldn't mark the module as complete until you completed them all. I would put off doing modules because of the feedback section. It took a few months to get through the modules between work. Just as I finished them, they re-issued the training to all employees on a different platform. So I've now got to do them all again. Hopefully no mandatory feedback this time.

    That's just usability issues with forms. On top of that there's poorly worded questions, or in the case of autism assesment I was sent an outdated form. Luckily I had saved all of my answers. The autism assessment one felt like it was designed to be triggering. I think I even put it as one of the amswers that I struggled with the ambiguity and different sets of instructions I was provided. 

Children
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