Student Health and Counseling | SUNY Geneseo

Contact Geneseo Admissions | SUNY Geneseo

Communication | SUNY Geneseo

Fast Facts: Fall 2024 | SUNY Geneseo

About SUNY Geneseo | SUNY Geneseo

Apply to Geneseo as a First-Year Student | SUNY Geneseo

Diversity at Geneseo | SUNY Geneseo

Page Not Found | SUNY Geneseo

Career Design Center | SUNY Geneseo

Academics at Geneseo | SUNY Geneseo

Forms should always contain a submit button, otherwise some people using
accessible technologies may not be able to submit the form.

Submit buttons are `<input>` elements with a type attribute of `submit` or
`image`, or `<button>` elements with type `submit`.

## Rationale 

Many users expect to be able to press enter in a form to submit it. However,
this is not always possible.

Users of some assistive technologies may (depending on the technology) only
be able to press a button to submit the form. In the absence of a submit
button, the user may not be able to submit the form.

In addition, the absence of a submit button suggests that the form may 
provide an automatic 'change of context', i.e. major change to the user 
interface without the user choosing to do so. This can be highly disorientating
to some users.

## Methodology

* All `<form>` elements on the page are tested separately.
* Check whether the <form> contains any of the following elements, and that the elements are visible
  when the page first loads:
  * `<input>`
  * `<textarea>`
  * `<checkbox>`
  * `<select>`
  * `<button>`
* If the form contains any of the above elements, then it is considered to
  need a submit button. If a submit button is missing, then a failure is reported.

### Field visibility check

The check for field visibility (above) is designed to ignore forms which perform functions not normally
associated with user interaction, such as tracking code, or ASPX forms which wrap every page 
but which don't contain any interactive elements. These are common potential false positives.

A trade-off here is that some forms may be invisible when a page loads, and later revealed to
a user following some interaction. If these are missing a submit button, Silktide will not detect them.
In practice, this false negative is far less likely than the false positive this prevents. 

## Further reading

* [WCAG 3.2.2 - On Input](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/on-input.html)
* [Technique H32](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H32.html)

form-submit-required

January 2026

December 2025

Geneseo University

Title / URL	Issues
Student Health and Counseling \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/health	1
Contact Geneseo Admissions \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/admissions/contact-us	1
Communication \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/communication	1
Fast Facts: Fall 2024 \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/ire/fast-facts	1
About SUNY Geneseo \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/about	1
Apply to Geneseo as a First-Year Student \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/admissions/apply	1
Diversity at Geneseo \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/diversity	1
Page Not Found \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/invented-url-for-404-page	1
Career Design Center \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/career-design	1
Academics at Geneseo \| SUNY Geneseowww.geneseo.edu/academics	1

Add a submit button to all forms

Geneseo University

Where this issue has occurred