Forms: inputting country names
Asking users to tell you which country they live is simple. Devising a method which is both usable and accessible for the user, and which provides good data is not. There are two main problems:
- There are between 194 and 239 countries, which is way too many for a drop-down select box (how long would you listen to JAWs read out that list until it got to Zambia, if that’s where you lived?)
- Some countries have synonyms: when I’m scrolling down a list, I don’t know whether I’m looking for “E” (England), “G” (Great Britain), “B” (Britain) or “U” for “United Kingdom”.