Eighteen months ago, three councils in the South East were each paying a supplier to build almost the same thing: accessible, GOV.UK-styled forms on top of Drupal's Webform module. Today twelve councils use one shared toolkit, maintained in the open by people who met on GDDN.
How it started
It began with a discussion thread titled "Is anyone else fighting Webform's error summary?" Within a week there were 40 replies and three nearly identical patches. Rather than pick one, we opened a shared repository and agreed some ground rules:
- No organisation owns it. Maintainers rotate every six months.
- Accessibility is the definition of done. Every component is tested with NVDA, VoiceOver and keyboard only before it is merged.
- Upstream first. If a fix belongs in Webform itself, it goes to Drupal.org and not into our fork.
What went wrong
We underestimated configuration drift. Each council had customised Webform differently, so "just install the toolkit" turned into weeks of untangling. In the end we wrote a migration checklist, and that helped more than any of the code.
We also learned that governance matters as much as code. Our first maintainer moved jobs and the project stalled for two months. Rotating maintainers fixed that.
The numbers
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch a new form | 2–3 weeks | 2–3 days |
| WCAG 2.2 AA failures per form (audit) | 7 on average | 0.4 on average |
| Councils paying for bespoke form work | 12 | 0 |
What's next
We're working on save-and-return and payment integration next, and we need more testers, especially people who use assistive technology every day. If your team wants to join, look for Accessible Webform Toolkit in the project pipeline and press "We need this too".
